{"id":86721,"date":"2026-09-03T04:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T04:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/86721\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T04:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T04:00:10","slug":"man-charged-over-alleged-social-media-threat-against-tanya-plibersek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/86721\/","title":{"rendered":"Man charged over alleged social media threat against Tanya Plibersek"},"content":{"rendered":"

A NSW Snowy Mountains man has faced court over allegations he threatened federal government minister Tanya Plibersek in a social media post.<\/p>\n

Shannon Bennett is facing a charge of using a carriage service to make a threat to kill or cause serious harm, after he was arrested by Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The AFP said its National Security Investigations team had been investigating the matter since July, after it received a report of an alleged online threat to kill a federal parliamentarian.<\/p>\n

Investigators said they linked the alleged post to 53-year-old Mr Bennett and searched his Berridale home on Wednesday, where they seized a mobile phone for examination.<\/p>\n

Ms Plibersek declined to comment, citing it as a police matter before the courts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bail granted<\/p>\n

Judge Te’res Sia granted Mr Bennett conditional bail in Bail Division Court 3 on Thursday morning and told the court that the matter was “serious in its allegations”.<\/p>\n

The court heard that the charge related to an alleged Facebook post from July 22.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Judge Sia said while Mr Bennett’s criminal history in Queensland and New South Wales was “not unblemished”, he had “no entries of a similar or identical kind”.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Mr Bennett is not to go within 100-metres of Tanya Plibersek’s electorate office in Redfern. (ABC News: Monish Nand)<\/p>\n

As part of his bail conditions, Mr Bennett is not allowed to use social media and he is not to go near or contact the Social Services minister.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He must also not go within 100 metres of Ms Plibersek’s electorate office in Sydney or Parliament House in Canberra, and must report to Cooma Police Station once a week.<\/p>\n

Mr Bennett appeared in court via audio-visual link from custody on Thursday and has not yet entered a plea.<\/p>\n

The maximum penalty for the offence is 10 years’ imprisonment.<\/p>\n

The AFP said it established a National Security Investigations team<\/a> in October 2025 to target people “causing high levels of harm to Australia’s social cohesion, including the targeting of federal parliamentarians”.<\/p>\n

Mr Bennett will face Queanbeyan Local Court on September 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A NSW Snowy Mountains man has faced court over allegations he threatened federal government minister Tanya Plibersek in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[103,144603,22,1758,21,144602,32885,144604,33828,144605,19683,29128,106,33380],"class_list":["post-86721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-afp","tag-alleged-threat","tag-au","tag-australian-federal-police","tag-austrlia","tag-berridale","tag-electorate-office","tag-federal-parliamentarian","tag-investigations","tag-member-of-parliament","tag-shannon-bennett","tag-snowy-mountains","tag-social-media","tag-tanya-plibersek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}