A young couple have been spared jail for a hateful neo-Nazi graffiti spree at a major university campus despite a magistrate labelling their behaviour as abhorrent.
Christopher Carrig, 20, and Taylor Bayly, 20, were sentenced on Tuesday over the vandalism at Macquarie University in the early hours of 25 January 2024.
The pair were ordered to reimburse the university for the cost of the damage.
Carrig was also sentenced over an antisemitic incident in which he intimidated a 20-year-old man at a bus stop, who he targeted for being Jewish.
The encounter was filmed and posted to social media.
During the interaction, Carrig told the man to remove a Jewish kippah – or skullcap – he was wearing and ordered him to kiss his shoes, Sydney’s Burwood Local Court heard.
The 20-year-old also told the man: “It’s quite low for a Jew to be waiting for the bus. Can’t you call uncle Goldstein and ask him to bring you a BMW?”
Carrig’s lawyer Rylie Hahn said her client had recently experienced significant trauma with the tragic deaths of two family members.
“His mother and sister recently and tragically passed away,” she said, adding that incident meant the young man had to move out of his family home.
An earlier police search of Carrig’s home revealed what a prosecutor on Tuesday described as “more or less a shrine to the Third Reich”.
At the time of spray-painting the Nazi slogans at Macquarie University, both Bayly and Carrig were intoxicated and were acting in response to a socialist poster they had seen, magistrate Mark Whelan was told.
The pair admitted to blackening their faces and entered the northern Sydney campus before they graffitied offensive symbols, including swastikas, across 24 locations.
The slogans included “fuck Antifa scum” and “Heil Hitler”, as well as references to the Australian neo-Nazi group National Socialist Network.
Whelan sentenced Bayly to serve a 15-month community corrections order, while Carrig was handed a two-year intensive corrections order in lieu of a full-time jail sentence.
The magistrate described the offending as “abhorrent”.
“It has no place in Australian society,” he said.
