McKew unfazed by death threats
March 3, 2007 - 1:50PM
Labor's star recruit Maxine McKew has vowed to continue her federal election campaign despite receiving death threats.
Authorities are also investigating Thursday night's discovery of men holding torches underneath Ms McKew's car parked in the driveway of her Sydney North Shore home.
The incident followed a number of death threats against the former ABC presenter since she announced she would take on Prime Minister John Howard in his seat of Bennelong.
Former intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie, who was the Greens candidate for the same seat in 2004, revealed today he too had been threatened during the last federal election campaign.
Ms McKew told reporters in Sydney today how her neighbour had given a detailed account to police after spotting the suspicious men around her car.
She said the neighbour told her he saw a strange car parked in a nearby laneway and two men, one underneath her car shining a torch into the undercarriage, the other looking inside.
A full search of the car by the bomb squad and sniffer dogs had turned up nothing, she said.
Ms McKew admitted the recent events had unsettled her but said she would be not deterred from her campaign to unseat Mr Howard.
"I've just got to take it in my stride," Ms McKew said. "You don't necessarily anticipate something like this but it hasn't thrown me."
Authorities were already aware of death threats made about the Labor candidate to the national terrorism hotline, she said.
While she now knew the details of those threats, Ms McKew declined to reveal their nature as they were "confidential".
Mr Wilkie told AAP he was threatened in a series of detailed letters in 2004 outlining what would be done to him if he continued his political campaign.
"I received a number of death threats, some so alarming I also had to go to police as Maxine McKew seems to have done," Mr Wilkie said. "It looks and sounds like the exact thing I faced."
Mr Wilkie said the threatening letters stopped after the election, in which he secured a small swing against Mr Howard, but abusive phone calls continued for many months until he changed his telephone number.
Mr Wilkie said he didn't go public about the threats at the time for fear of appearing to imply that sections of Mr Howard's support had resorted to dirty tricks in the election.
