A Greens candidate who joked about coward punch attacks being brave is anti-police and wants to seize property from landlords.
More controversial social media posts from Tom Raue, who is running for the party in the seat of Summer Hill at the upcoming New South Wales election, have emerged today.
So too has a column he penned for a university newspaper in which the self-described anarchist called for the function of government to be abolished.
Mr Raue was in hot water on Tuesday after a Twitter post from 2014 began circulating, in which he said it “takes a lot of guts” to punch someone from behind without warning and described coward punches as “brave”.
It sparked outrage and prompted an apology from the union official, who said the remarks — just days after 18-year-old Daniel Christie died after being coward punched — were “foolish, off the hand”.
Now, news.com.au has obtained a number of social media posts from Mr Raue in which he expressed anti-government, anti-police and anti-property ownership sentiments.
A video he posted to Facebook in June last year said: “Let’s seize our homes back from the landlords and our infrastructure from the corporations.”
In a 2015 tweet, he wrote that “there are no good cops” while in a Facebook message from last November he said “we don’t need more police, we need fewer”.
“The main function of police has always been to enforce property relations — keeping the rich rich and the poor poor,” Mr Raue wrote.
He was commenting on a news article about a significant increase in police numbers in NSW.
Mr Raue has also called for the abolishment of prisons, which he said “increase recidivism, destroy communities and are increasingly filled with Aboriginal people”.
In a student newspaper column, he wrote that “freedom is hindered by the existence of government” — even though he is now running to be part of it.
“For the individual to flourish and society to prosper, we must do away with the government and the market together,” Mr Raue wrote.
Eventually, he wrote, goods could be produced and distributed ”through a gift economy”.
Mr Raue did not specifically respond to a list of questions from news.com.au, but said: “I have long been an activist for social change, and continue to be. I am running for parliament to try and bring about significant change to address inequality in all its forms.”
His controversial positions do not appear as policy platforms on Mr Raue’s page on the Greens website.
NSW heads to the polls on March 23.
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