Australian political assassin or innocent migrant community leader? The tale of Phuong Canh Ngo
- Phuong Canh Ngo was jailed for life in 2001 for masterminding the 1994 murder of John Newman, a New South Wales politician, but was he guilty of the crime?
As a nation born from a penal colony, Australia has a long history of colourful and loathed criminals, but few are more reviled than Phuong Canh Ngo, a former Vietnamese refugee who holds the unenviable title of being the country’s first and only convicted political assassin.
In June 2001, a supreme court jury found that Ngo had masterminded the murder of John Newman, an MP in the state of New South Wales. Newman was shot dead in front of his fiancée, Lucy Wang, outside the couple’s home in Cabramatta – a suburb within his electorate in the Fairfield local government area of western Sydney – on the evening of September 5, 1994.
Home to the largest migrant hostel in the state before its demolition in the early 1990s, Cabramatta has long been a nesting ground for migrants from all walks of life. But the arrival of boatpeople in Australia after the end of the Vietnam war, coupled with a massive jump in migration following the Southeast Asian country’s relaxing of departure restrictions in 1990, transformed Cabramatta into a thriving Asian community nicknamed “Little Saigon”.
By 1995, a third of the suburb’s population identified as Vietnamese, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Today, the main thoroughfare of John Street resembles a historic Chinatown, with a large crimson-coloured Chinese gateway celebrating liberty and democracy, bronze lion statues symbolising strength and piglet sculptures representing prosperity. Asian grocers sell frozen durian and dragon fruit from Indonesia.
There are gold traders, thrift shops, haberdasheries galore, and Vietnamese restaurants that dish up the best pho and banh mi south of the Mekong Delta.
