A tweet from an opposition lawmaker in Australia causes outrage
Following the arrest of an immigrant for sexual assault, the deputy opposition leader of Australia came under criticism for a tweet in which she claimed that “foreign criminals” were assaulting women. However, the police later acknowledged that they had the incorrect guy.
Sussan Ley of the conservative Liberal Party attempted to capitalize on voter anxieties about immigration and crime in a tweet denounced as “grubby” by the government in before of this weekend’s Dunkley, Victoria, by-election.
The deputy leader of the opposition Liberal Party wrote on X on Thursday, saying, “Vote against Labor if you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals.”
Despite requests for her to remove it, the tweet remained up on the social networking site on Friday.
Ley shared the statement after the 44-year-old guy’s arrest by Victoria police on charges of many sexual offenses. The man was a previous immigration prisoner.
Cops, however, issued an apology on Thursday for mistakenly apprehending the incorrect guy, claiming that subsequent photographs captured on closed-circuit television revealed an identical-looking man to be the real offender.
Victoria police chief Mark Galliot said during a press conference, “It is clear the person arrested is not the offender.”
“We are sincerely sorry that this person has been detained.”
The guy who was wrongfully arrested was one of 149 immigration detainees who were freed from custody last year after a High Court ruling that their detention could not be extended indefinitely. The majority of these prisoners had criminal backgrounds.
“I find it extraordinary that Ms. Ley has refused to delete that tweet,” Labor Party prime minister Anthony Albanese, a center-leftist, said to reporters on Friday.
He attacked the opposition, accusing them of “shooting from the hip” and waging a “fear campaign” in relation to the community’s release of immigrants.
“You have a fear campaign about everything and a solution for nothing,” Albanese said.
Ley was instructed to remove the tweet by Education Minister Jason Clare, who referred to it as a “desperate, grubby political scare campaign” during their Friday morning TV program argument.
Ley criticized the government of not demonstrating that it was keeping the population secure by appropriately monitoring freed immigration prisoners with criminal histories.
“As a woman, I am not taking a backward step on this, and I am calling it out,” she said.
According to official records, seven of the freed convicts had prior convictions for murder or attempted murder, 37 for sexual offenses, 72 for assault and violent offenses, abduction or armed robbery, and 16 for domestic abuse or stalking.
