Opinion
Often, question time begins with a few minutes of condolence or bipartisan sentiment. Then it quickly descends into an hour of rancour and abuse that would lose you your job in any other workplace. Members of parliament labelling colleagues “traitors”, calling for them to be “stoned in the square”, to have a bag put over their head, to “rip him a new one”.
Politicians are regularly asking our community to disagree well, but our hypocrisy is often on display. Fundamentally, we need to collectively look in the mirror today and consider how it is that we got here.
Helen Haines is the best of us – a politician with deep roots in her community who brings integrity and intelligence to Canberra.
“Minister, I have some serious concerns about this approach. Can you tell me more about ...”
That’s the start of a Helen question. Polite, but extremely effective and probing. Her gentle demeanour belies her enormous contribution, particularly on government accountability and transparency. The people of Indi could not ask for a more diligent, serious and compassionate representative in public life.
Helen is warm and courageous. She will tell you to your face when she doesn’t agree with you, give you good, thought-through reasons, and then follow her conscience. She is funny. She is practical: she laughingly told me that as a bush midwife, she can make a splint out of an old newspaper. When I think of her like this, I am despairing.
While Australia does not have a history of political violence, we do have the same trends as other democracies: rising aggression, threats and disruption.
Reports of threats and harassment against federal parliamentarians to the Australian Federal Police rose from 279 in 2020-21 to more than 1000 in 2023-24. If you are in parliament, you feel it. You see the threats, the aggression particularly online. You try to ignore them.
What shocks me the most is that almost one in 10 Australians told last year’s McKinnon Index that violence can be justified for a political cause. We are successful as a country because we manage our disagreements through the ballot box, the parliament, the courts, through our institutions. But one in 10 seriously think violence is a political tool.
As you look at the statistics, and particularly at online abuse, there is a deeply serious question – how did we get to a place where such aggression is socially permitted? And how do we turn it back?
None of us have the answer, and we need to be careful about generalising from this specific incident which we still do not understand. But the broader trend of aggression towards politicians needs confronting.
Many will point to the security services and their role in keeping politicians safe. That is critical and we need a serious reassessment. But just layering on the security of politicians delivers the opposite of the politics that Helen championed – engaged, available, local – and we mustn’t lose it. Security matters, but our culture I believe matters more and is harder to address.
Social media companies obviously have a role to play. Algorithms amplify outrage because outrage keeps us scrolling, and bots manipulate opinion at scale. ASIO has been clear that online radicalisation is a security risk – from violent Islamist extremism to violent misogyny. Regulation can help, but much of what the social media companies amplify is aggressive content that fellow Australians are putting out there.
When abuse is normalised at the highest level, it makes room not only for extremism but for obsession and derangement. We don’t yet know the perpetrator’s motive or mental state, but Australian and international research shows many people who stalk, threaten or approach politicians live with serious, often untreated, mental illness. Though public discourse rarely makes such a person violent, it can shape who they fixate on and the story they tell themselves about why.
It’s not just politicians who are abused and in danger – it’s teachers, nurses, supermarket workers. It’s the sort of abuse our grandmothers would have condemned. Somehow, all of us need to step up and say enough – we treat each other with respect, with dignity. We owe it to each other, whatever we agree or disagree on.
No one in public life should ever expect violence. It is most shocking when it is directed at someone who never uses aggression as a political tool.