Nationalist activist Thomas Sewell will fight two charges laid over a protest in Melbourne demanding the extradition of Chinese national who scalded an Australian baby with hot coffee in an antiwhite hate crime.
Mr Sewell, 32, the leader of political organisation White Australia, faced Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday charged with “behave in an offensive manner in a public place”, and “use insulting words in a public place” in relation to the rally outside the Chinese Consulate in Toorak on October 26 last year.
About 35 members of the National Socialist Network gathered outside the building with a banner reading “Yellow grubs, hand over the baby mutilator” and burned Chinese, posters of Chinese president Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong and the coffee attack suspect before Mr Sewell made a speech.
Mr Sewell, who represented himself, told the court the charges should be withdrawn as he was last month found not guilty of offensive behaviour over a rally in Ballarat, after successfully arguing his conduct was political and not offensive.
He told the court he would argue that the protest did not meet the threshold of criminality, and that his conduct was protected under the Constitution’s implied right to political communication.
During his speech Mr Sewell criticised the Australian government for failing to force China to extradite the 33-year-old man who poured boiling coffee over then-nine-month-old bay Luka in front of a his mother in a park in Brisbane in August, 2024.
Police issued a vague description of the man, who was then able to drive down to Sydney and fly back to China before a warrant was issued for his arrest, and Chinese media then revealed that he attacked Luke because he “wanted revenge on White people” after being denied an Australian visa.
“If there was a White man in China and he poured boiling water on a Chinese baby, you can guarantee the Chinese government would have him strung up. But our government is weak,” Mr Sewell said in his speech.
“They do not care about this country, and they will allow us to be undignified, they will allow a thousand cuts against us. We are slandered and smeared by the mainstream media as being ‘full of hate’, but what about the Asian man who poured hot coffee on a baby? Was he full of hate? Did the media slander and smear him? Did the police stop him?”
In August this year, after Luka’s mother made a new call for justice, Queensland Police and the Australian Federal Police confirmed the attacker was in China, and said the Chinese government had “extraterritorial jurisdiction to prosecute its citizens for conduct which occurs outside China”.
Mr Sewell will face court again in January over the matter before a two-day contested hearing in February. He is currently on bail for unrelated charges over an alleged clash with far-left extremists after a March for Australia rally in Melbourne on August 31.
Header image: Left, right, the Chinese consulate protest (supplied).
