Mike Angove: Walk Without Fear Board Member on the new sentencing around coward punches

A charitable trust is commending tougher sentences for people throwing coward punches. 

The Government's new specific offence for striking a distracted victim could carry a sentence of life imprisonment if fatal.  

Walk Without Fear has been pushing for changes after MMA fighter Liufau Vake was killed by a single coward punch in 2021.  

Board Member Mike Angove told Mike Hosking the charges need to be in conjunction with education that starts at a school level. 

He says that no one argues against the lethality of attacking someone with a knife or a gun, but people are unaware that hitting someone who’s unaware can result in permanent damage or a lethal outcome. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Also called king hits of course in Australia, and there's
a new law around this. So what they're doing is
introducing a culpable homicide offense for the one punch attack
that results in death. Maximum penalty there for life a
walk without fear of trust. They've long campaign for this,
of course Mike Ango as a board member of that
particular trust and as well as Mike.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Morning to you, Good morning, Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Have they got it about right? The government?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Look? I think so, you know, put really simply the
previous laws mixed up within the GBH laws with a
lot of precedents set in, too many discounts being been given,
meant that the coward punch wasn't recognized for its potential lethality,
which it has been now. And further to that, just

(00:42):
understanding how lethal it is and making it very very
clear that this is no king hit. This is exactly
what we're talking about, which is a potentially lethal coward punch.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
So it's the punishment as opposed to the distancenter. Because
I can't believe somebody's out there going, oh, well, I
was going to whack you, but now I'm not because
I might end up in jail for longer. That's not
how it works.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Is it. Look, and I've said this previously, I think
what you have to have this in conjunction with, which
is education, particularly starting at school level, and that's what
we're heavily involved in as well. You can't have a
big stick if you're not also educating people around the
culture of violence, around the danger that the card punch

(01:25):
can cause. So those things should work hand in glove.
What I think politically is people get two head up
and too fixed to one idea that just being purely
punitive doesn't work. But at the end of the day,
I don't think anyone would argue that if you're attacking
someone with a knife or a gun, that has a
high degree of lethality associated with it. When you're hitting

(01:47):
someone when they do not know a punch is coming,
or with our blind shot, it has a high degree
of permanent damage and lethality about it, And no one
would argue that if you had lethal intent, Okay, and
we need to understand and we need to introduce this
into our thinking that that kind of act has lethal intent,
then there's really no excuse.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Good on you might I appreciate your time Mike Anger,
who's with the Walk Without Fear. Trust for more from
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