Greens staffer ‘stoked race fire’

THE Greens staffer who spray painted “No pride in genocide” on a statue of Captain Cook in central Sydney has been compared in court to a “guerrilla in the night” who deliberately fu- elled Australia’s longstanding g racial tensions.

Xiaoran Shi (pictured) was s on Friday convicted for paint- ing those words, ‘sovereignty

y never ceded’ and the Aborigi

- nal flag in black on the three sides of the Hyde Park monument’s base in the hours after Sydney’s second Black Lives Matter protest in June.

The 28-year-old can expect further punishment after she escaped waiting media outside the Downing Centre Local Court by exiting through a fire door and set off alarms.

Soon after Shi released a statement declaring “the real crime is that nobody has been convicted for an Aboriginal death in custody”, after her lawyer Michael Blair had told the court his client took full responsibility for the act.

Shi was arrested alongside her “lookout” Charmaine Morrison-Mills on nearby College Street after police were alerted to the vandalism about 4 o’clock on June 14.

Officers caught the activists red-handed, finding a bag of spray cans, and both women pleaded guilty to possessing graffiti implements and wilfully defacing a protected place.

Downing Centre Local Court heard Shi – a part-time staffer of NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge – was bom

y barded with ““abhorrent abhorrente abuse” sent by “keyboard warriors” online after her arrest.

Deputy chief magistrate Michael Allen asked reporters in the court to take heed of the racist slurs Shi was subjected to, calling them as inexcusable.

The magistrate accepted the vandalism was motivated by a “genuine” belief but described the duo as being like “guerillas in the night” who undermined the “absolute, unquestionable” right to peaceful protest.

“There is a clear tension in the community between those who consider (those sorts of) monuments to be hurtful and others who consider them symbols of pride,” he said.

“What these sorts of actions do is add fuel to the fires of the extremes of those debates.”

Morrison-Mills was convicted on July 2 after pleading guilty to the charges and fined $2000. The 27-year-old was also ordered to pay the City of Sydney $449.85 – half the cost of removing the graffiti.

Shi was ordered to stump up the other half of the cost in addition to her own fine of $1760.