“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.
“I can’t send my children and wife to the park because anything can happen, anytime, anywhere.
“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?'”
Unlike unlawful acts, criminal offences are pursued by police or the state, and attract harsher punishments like imprisonment.
Professor Asquith said Western Australia and New South Wales had criminal legislation covering racist crimes.
She said despite there being “only a handful of prosecutions” for racist crimes, having the legislation was “really critical”.
“We promote ourselves to the world as being multicultural and inclusive, and progressive, and yet targeted communities have been recording and talking about targeted violence against them for over 30 years.”
“It’s something communities recognise, that they are substantively different crimes and the harms are substantially different than the comparable crimes without the hate motivation.”
Afraid to speak up
Multicultural Council of Tasmania chair Aimen Jafri said she hears about racist incidents “every day”.
Ms Jafri wants laws changed to ensure crimes motivated by race and other prejudices are recorded in the statistics as such “so that reasonable action can be taken”.
She also wants to break down the barriers migrants face that may discourage them from reporting unlawful or criminal acts.
“People feel they might jeopardise their visas, people feel that if they report, it could bring shame to them,” Ms Jafri said.
“So there are a lot of myths that we need to address together.
“We need to work on it legislatively. We need to educate our communities, we need to educate our police … It’s a continuous process.”
Labor pledges change
Labor candidate for Clark Ella Haddad said her party would answer Ms Jafri’s calls if elected in this month’s Tasmanian election.
Ms Haddad said Labor planned to create new offences to reflect racially motivated and other hate crimes, and to help prevent them through an education campaign and a whole-of-government anti-racism strategy.
“We’ll be amending Tasmania’s criminal laws to make sure that when someone commits a crime and they were motivated by racial hatred or racism, they will be charged with an offence that recognises that,” she said.
“They will be charged with a new offence that recognises hate crime here in Tasmania, which, really worryingly, we know is starkly increasing.
“Racially motivated crimes are not OK, we should never accept them.
“But at the moment, the police don’t have the tools they need to charge someone and recognise that the crime they’ve committed was motivated by racism.”
Police aware of concerns
Tasmania Police Assistant Commissioner Adrian Bodnar said it was important to consider the difficulty in identifying the motivation behind a crime.
“Which means it may be problematic to record whether an incident was motivated by prejudice or otherwise in a consistent and meaningful way,” Mr Bodnar said.
He said police were aware of concerns and collaborated with the Multicultural Council and Equal Opportunity Tasmania to “identify instances of reported hate crimes and ensure any response is commensurate with the circumstances”.
He said the breadth of data captured in Tasmania Police systems was being considered going forward.
Professor Asquith said the ways police report and record hate crimes “vary considerably” across Australia.
The New South Wales crime reporting system requires answering a specific question about whether the crime is prejudice-related, meaning statistics and reports can be easily extracted.
“If nothing else, we need to know the extent of targeted violence in our communities in order to support victims,” Professor Asquith said.
Ms Jafri said it was not enough for police to say that pinpointing motivation was difficult.
“There are very clear incidents. Very, very clear,” she said.
“Like when there is graffiti outside our community members’ house saying ‘You Indian, go back to where you came from’.
“You can not get away with saying it’s difficult.”
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