Former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas speaks from hospital as NSW police charge her over protest
The former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas has been charged with resisting police after she was injured at a pro-Palestinian protest.
Thomas, who ran against Anthony Albanese in the Sydney electorate of Grayndler at the federal election, sustained facial injuries while being arrested in Belmore on Friday morning and was taken to hospital.
In a statement on Sunday evening, NSW police said a 35-year-old woman had been issued a future court attendance notice for hindering or resisting a police officer in the execution of duty and refusing/failing to comply with direction to disperse.
She is scheduled to appear at Bankstown local court on 12 August.
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Thomas shared a video on social media on Sunday evening, thanking her community for their support and saying there was a possibility she could lose her sight in one eye.
'I've been very lucky to have been looked after so well,' she said in an Instagram post recorded at Bankstown hospital.
'I don't want to get into too much detail about the traumatic events on Friday but I'm five-foot-one, I weight about 45kg, I was engaged in peaceful protest … My interactions with NSW police have left me potentially without vision in my right eye permanently.'
The NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson has called for an investigation into the incident.
'The level of impunity the police displayed doesn't come from nowhere. It's written there in black and white – a direct reference to the anti-protest laws rushed through the NSW Parliament,' the Greens' spokesperson for justice said in a statement on Monday.
She called for the 'agenda of intolerance and anti-protest measures' to be reversed.
The protest was outside a business in Belmore accused of 'supplying electroplating and surface coating services for a variety of applications including aerospace and defence technology' to Israel.
Earlier this year an international campaign urged nations that produce F-35 fighter jets to stop supplying Israel.
SEC Plating told Guardian Australia on Friday that: 'We have no involvement in providing plating services for various parts used in the F-35 Jet program.
'We do not have any business servicing F-35 components. We do have business servicing some Australian defence manufactures however F-35 components are not part of this.'
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