A toxic combination of booze and youth is behind three attacks on Indian cab drivers in Victoria, say police who are insisting the violent outbursts are not race related.
Two Indian taxi drivers were assaulted at Ballarat on Friday night, just hours after a man was jailed for his attack on a cabbie in the same town a day (a day) earlier.
But a local detective says the attacks are the result of young men in the town having problems with alcohol and violence, and are not race-related.
"The majority of taxi drivers in Ballarat are Indian," Detective Senior Constable Jeff Highthorn told AAP, adding that while three attacks on drivers in two days was "unusual" it was not uncommon for drivers to be targeted by drunken youths.
On weekends, you sometimes get drunken youths that attempt to catch cabs for nothing and assault people and act in an anti-social way.
"Unfortunately, some youth today think such skylarking is funny."
The first incident occurred shortly before midnight in Sebastopol when four male youths assaulted a driver, including punching him and spitting at him, and briefly stole his taxi.
They tried to pull on the handbrake and steering wheel and broke a radio screen, Highthorn said.
Two of the men ran from the taxi and the driver chased them while a third ran past and hit him on the head with a fist causing the driver to fall over.
A fourth man drove the taxi about 500 metres east along Birdwood Avenue.
The four males have been described as being between 16 and 18 years old and all were earing black t-shirts.
The driver, aged 25 years from Ballarat East, was taken to Ballarat Hospital for treatment to bruising to his upper body and swelling to his face.
About an hour later, at 1.15am a taxi was called to Birdwood Ave and asked to go to Wendouree. When the taxi arrived in Grevillea Road the two men got out of the taxi and one approached the driver's side with a knife in his hand.
The driver, a 26-year-old from Ballarat, drove off and was not injured.
On Friday, 48-year-old Paul John Brogden, of Navigators near Ballarat, was jailed for three months after racially abusing an Indian taxi driver during a drunken rampage.
He had told the driver he would kill him when he was dropped off before racially vilifying him and damaging the taxi.
There has been a spate of violent attacks on Indians in Victoria, including the stabbing murder of Nitin Garg in Melbourne earlier this month.
Gautam Gupta, spokesman for the Federation of Indian students in Australia, has called on the Victorian government to act on newly established hate crimes legislation.
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