Nearly three violent or menacing threats against federal politicians are being reported to police daily, according to Australian federal police data, with rates almost doubling in two years.
The soaring danger for elected officials and their staff reached new heights this week when Anthony Albanese was evacuated from The Lodge in Canberra over a bomb threat.
The AFP confirmed reports of violent threats, including death threats, against federal politicians have been on the rise, almost doubling from 555 in 2021-22 to 951 reports in 2024-25.
The troubling statistics have coincided with at least 21 charges laid against individuals since October.
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The prime minister was evacuated from his official Canberra residence on Tuesday night for three hours as police responded to a bomb threat made against him.
The threat was believed to made in relation to upcoming performances of the Chinese performance group Shen Yun, linked with the political spiritual movement Falun Dafa – a group banned in China and strongly outspoken against the Chinese Communist party.
But many of the recent charges for violent threats against politicians point to aggrieved lone actors on social media.
Since taking the reins, the AFP’s new commissioner, Krissy Barrett, has set up National Security Investigations teams tasked with investigating those “causing high levels of harm to Australia’s social cohesion”.
Barrett described the police team in December as a “flying squad of hate disrupters who focus on high-harm, high-impact politically motivated violence, communal violence and hate crimes that do not meet the threshold for terrorism investigations but drive fear and division”.
The independent Wentworth MP, Allegra Spender, referred to police a threat to “rhetorically rape” her in November. The threat was made in a neo-Nazi channel on Telegram after Spender’s condemnation of a neo-Nazi rally outside New South Wales parliament. A prominent neo-Nazi has since been charged.
In December, a 31-year-old Sydney man was charged with threatening to kill the communications minister, Anika Wells, and her family in two emails.
Greg William Tait, 43, was charged in January for threatening to kill a federal MP believed to be the prime minister in December shortly after the Bondi shooting while a western Sydney man, 55, was charged last week for threatening to kill the federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers.
‘We’ve got to stay vigilant’
Western Australia senator Fatima Payman told Guardian Australia her office had been “pretty much bombarded with hate and death threats almost every day” since she left the Labor party.
“It’s sad that people seem to have lost all sense of shame,” the independent senator said.
In November 2025, 51-year-old Victorian man Sean David Sharman was sentenced to an 18-month community corrections order for using a carriage service to make a threat to kill.
The threat was targeted at Payman, the ABC reported. Sharman had called the senator “a domestic terrorist” and indicated he had written Payman’s name on a bullet intended for her.
In a Senate estimates hearing in February, Payman asked the commissioner how political staffers were able to determine whether a threat is serious or not. The senator said her team had reported further death threats but had been told by federal police to “keep a dossier and decide when behaviour reached a threshold”.
Payman said she tried not to dwell on violent comments posted to social media but it was “absolutely exhausting” for her and her team to consistently monitor.
“For the most part, these comments are coming from sad, lonely, pitiful keyboard warriors, or from farm bots,” she said.
“But we’ve got to stay vigilant, and especially after what happened on Invasion Day here in WA.
“Why must we wait for a massive catastrophe to take place for us to take something seriously?”
Wider fear among politicians
A review into parliamentary resources released in August indicated 72% of the surveyed parliamentarians and staff believed there had been a steady increase in the number of violent and threatening behaviour.
Eighty-five per cent of those surveyed said they had dealt with violent and threatening voters and 46% said they experienced this behaviour more than once a month.
The report recommended regular security assessments of electorate offices and more guidance for staff on how to report incidents.
Barrett said the safety and security of politicians, their family and staff continued to be a “top priority”.
“We also have a fixated threat assessment team, which does look to those behaviours you described, whether someone’s escalating or ramping up, and whether we need to intervene,” she said.
“That may not always be a police intervention. It might be a mental health intervention or some other joint intervention by authorities.
“Please encourage your office to continue to keep recording information and reporting it to us so that we have the full picture.”
