Australian flag burning: Calls to change laws after Australia Day incident, Perth home raided over bomb scare

On Australia Day, Aussies were confronted with intense scenes including Australian flags being burnt, a bomb threat and assaults.

The scenes have sparked a frenzy of outrage from Australians who are calling for laws to be changed, including making burning the Australian flag illegal.

In Queens Garden in Queensland, an Australian flag was set on fire at an Invasion Day rally. At a March for Australia Day rally in Melbourne, Victoria Police stepped in after a man was seen attempting to burn the national flag.

Speaking to Sunrise on Tuesday, Education Minister Jason Clare described actions across the country as “seriously bad”, but refused to clarify if he thinks burning the flag should be illegal.

“Yesterday we saw some seriously bad things in Perth. Someone threw a bomb into a crowd,” he told Sunrise.

“If that had worked, if that was real, then a lot of people could have been killed.

“On the other side of the country we had a neo-nazi that was spraying evil language from a lectern about Jewish people.

“Haven’t we learned anything here? You know, we know that words can lead to bullets. That’s why we passed those hate laws through Parliament last week. We need to turn the temperature down here.

“Most Australians would be looking at that idiot burning the flag and just shaking their head.”

Host Nat Barr told Mr Clare Australians are saying that burning the flag should be illegal.

“As I understand it, there are already laws in states for police to act,” Mr Clare said.

“I remember John Howard saying that if you change the law here, you just turn yahoos martyrs.”

Asked again if flag burning should be illegal, Mr Clare said “I’ll leave it to the legal eagles”, before saying that Australia is the best country in the world.

Barr pushed the minister again, asking him what he personally thought after he refused multiple times to address if the act should be made legal.

“Well, as I said, I’ll defer to the experts here about what works,” Mr Clare said.

“We do need to send a message to these people that this is a country we should be proud of. This is a flag we should be proud of. It’s not a flag we should be burning.”

Do you think burning the Australian Flag should be illegal? Let us know in the comments below.

Perth bomb threat

In Perth’s CBD, Invasion Day demonstrators were told to leave the area after a man threw what’s believed to be a rudimentary explosive device into the crowd.

Police said they arrested a 31-year-old man and recovered a device made of ball bearings and screws, wrapped around an “unidentified liquid” in a glass container.

“Forensics are currently doing what they need to do to identify what that liquid is,” WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch told reporters in Perth.

The device, about the size of a medium coffee cup, did not explode and nobody was hurt.

Officers searched the man’s house. He is yet to be charged. Mr Blanch said there was no ongoing threat to the community.

One man who attended a rally in Sydney is facing charges of publicly inciting racial hatred, accused of spewing neo-Nazi talking points at a demonstration in Surry Hills.

“We will allege that the language he used, his presence, was clearly and unequivocally assigned with neo-Nazi ideology,” NSW Police assistant commissioner Brett McFadden told reporters.

- With AAP