A Perth teenager has admitted he made threats to kill both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and NSW Premier Chris Minns in a direct Instagram message.
Will James King, 19, appeared in Mandurah Magistrates Court on Tuesday where he pleaded guilty to threatening to kill after police traced his online activity to an address in Meadow Springs, about 70 kilometres south of Perth, and arrested him in January.
He was charged by officers from the state security investigations group after an anti-Semitic message was sent to Minns’ Instagram on January 14, which the court heard was as a result of King “seeing the news and getting annoyed”.
“You’re a Jew, not a real Semite. I’ll assassinate you and Albo and the country will be a better place,” King wrote.
After his arrest he told police “I didn’t mean for it to be a threat, I wasn’t going to do anything, I’ve seen the news and got annoyed”.
“He found himself on Instagram reading the news and exercised poor error in judgement,” his lawyer said, adding that King was “not racist” and did not realise the gravity of the message.
“He had been reading material online, reading info about anti-Semitic behaviour about Jews, he says he adopted some of those sentiments.”
King has since been placed onto a mental health care plan and wrote a letter of apology to the court.
Magistrate Clare Cullen said a term of imprisonment would be a starting point come sentencing in June.
King is the third person in Australia to be recently accused of threatening Albanese, with a Sydney man accused of making threatening phone calls to the Prime Minister’s office the day after the Bondi terrorist attack, and a Queensland man charged in October for allegedly threatening Albanese’s life on social media.
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