An elderly female One Nation staffer has been viciously bashed by four far-left extremists at the Royal Queensland Show amid growing concerns about left-wing political violence and terrorism.
The attack came a day after high school and university students at protests against One Nation were caught on camera saying they wanted to murder party leader Pauline Hanson, while far-left extremists at a protest in Melbourne in June also called for Ms Hanson’s death.
“A lot of those who oppose One Nation like to claim moral superiority, yet the climate of hate fostered by protests like the ones last Thursday is leading directly to the depraved act we saw last Friday,” the party said in a statement.
One Nation Chief of Staff James Ashby confirmed that the woman, a grandmother aged in her 60s, suffered a broken rib and severe bruising after being attacked by three young women and a man at the Ekka in Brisbane on Friday.
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Mr Ashby said he believed the staffer was targeted due to her One Nation T-shirt as she was first abused and called “ignorant” before being punched in the ribs, and NSW MP Barnaby Joyce said the woman was spat on before the attack.
“We have got to really, within this space, call it for what it is. This is completely outrageous,” Mr Joyce said.
“If it was a person in the Greens or the Labor Party and happened to them, we’d be rightly outraged. This is not the Australia we live in.”
Mr Joyce also spoke out about comments made the student protesters, which included calls to “bring back the guillotine”, and called it an alarming trend.
“We don’t go around promoting the murder of politicians. We’re not supposed to anyway,” he said.
The attack and violent rhetoric comes after two men from far-left extremist group Antifa, which is a designated terrorist group in the US, attacked a photographer at an anti-One Nation rally in Brisbane last month.
Police officers witnessed the assault but did not make any arrests, and instead forced the victim to leave the area.
Australia’s left-wing Labor government came under criticism for focusing on right-wing extremism after the Bondi Islamic terrorist attack, and in April Trump officials warned Australia to start combating Antifa and other violent far-left groups, and stop underestimating the threat of left-wing terror.
Header image: A One Nation T-shirt (Facebook).
