“Trauma” is now how Toya Raj Bhattarai sums up the frequent attacks on him, his employees, and the grocery store business he’s been growing since moving to Hobart’s northern suburbs.

Mr Raj Bhattarai said that on multiple occasions, strangers have ripped off his dhaka topi (a Nepalese hat), thrown it on the ground and spat on it, and hurled racist abuse at him and his employees.

He has also had his shop front smashed and vandalised. He said his store had been broken into, and shelves of produce inside had been destroyed, adding up to thousands of dollars in damage.

Mr Raj Bhattarai has lived in Australia for 15 years, but he said it was not until moving to Tasmania about three years ago, that he faced racist violence.

“Of course, it is very hard,” Mr Raj Bhattarai said. 

“It is the trauma, when I see this going on here. And if [the public] sees it, everyone will get scared to come into this shop,” he said. 

‘Everyone is scared’

Tasmania’s multicultural community says racism is increasing. 

Mr Raj Bhattarai said it had come to the point where Nepalese people no longer felt safe living in Hobart’s northern suburbs.

“They use very vulgar words, and sometimes they say ‘go back to your country,’ and all those kinds of words,” he said.

“Everyone is scared.”

Racial discrimination and racially motivated crimes are under-reported, and there is little data to help understand the extent of the problem.

Push to update legislation

Racial discrimination is unlawful, rather than criminal, in all Australian states and territories. It means victims must pursue the case themselves.

In Tasmania it is Equal Opportunity Tasmania — the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner’s office — that deals with cases of racial discrimination.

If a crime, for example an assault, is found to be racially motivated, that motivation can be considered by the judge as an aggravating factor when the perpetrator is sentenced.

But Nicole Asquith, a professor in policing at the University of Tasmania and the convenor of the Australian Hate Crime Network, said racial motivation was rarely considered as an aggravating factor.

“Most often, the hate crime component of sentencing is not considered, only the substantive offence is,” she said.

“That’s primarily because the way in which to prove the motivation is often difficult, and prosecutors think, ‘well, we’ve got them for the substantive offence anyway, so why worry about this?'”