Wangaratta has been thrust into an unwelcome highlight this week. Residents in this rural Victorian city are used to catering to vacationers passing through on their method to regional wineries, or music lovers visiting its annual jazz and blues pageant.
Instead, locals are fielding countless questions about their MP – and having to clarify to strangers what it all means for the city’s almost 30,000 people.
They are clearly in shock about what police say was a focused and deliberate attack on Helen Haines on Monday afternoon, when she was struck by a car just outside her workplace.
“People are simply dumbfounded and finding it very hard to fathom the scale of this tragedy,” Australia’s Governor-General Sam Mostyn, who represents King Charles, said at a press convention on Wednesday.
The unbiased federal MP had to have both legs amputated after she was airlifted to Melbourne. But the “two most important parts of Helen”, her coronary heart and her thoughts, were in “good shape”, her husband Phil Haines said.
The MP is not a divisive determine, locals inform the BBC, and no one can perceive why she was allegedly focused.
“Everyone knows Helen,” says Jane Hill, who owns a occasion provide store a few hundred metres down the city’s predominant road from where Haines was hit.
“She is a such a good person in our community. She’d go to everything – celebrations, funerals, she’s one of those genuinely kind people – and so are her family.”
Local man Brendan Nugent, whose father has been good associates with Haines for many years, faces at least three costs over the alleged attack including deliberately inflicting hurt and appeared in court on Wednesday. Police say they are contemplating further costs, including tried homicide.
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