"The police aren’t doing anything"

On Friday January 5 Theo walked out his front door and found a homemade bomb on the hood of his ute. The bomb carried a note warning Theo to take down the Palestinian flag he and his partner had hung outside their house.

Theo called the cops. They came with the Bomb Squad and forensics and stayed for about three hours, took statements from Theo and his partner and promised they’d be in touch.

I spoke to Theo and his partner on Tuesday January 23. At the time they’d been waiting nearly two weeks for the cops to update them and had heard nothing.

“The police aren’t doing anything. This is not being investigated,” Theo says. “It has fallen to my partner and I to investigate this and pressure the people whose job it is to investigate it, as well as other people volunteering their time and support. There’s a profound sense of betrayal by what I naively thought was a policing and justice system that kind of worked, despite its flaws.

“Knowing about the Burgertory arson and Dr Peter Slezak’s assault makes me feel phenomenally at risk and like there’s an active effort by the state government and the policing system to brush incidents like this down through the cracks.”