Independent and minor party MPs say their staff are being inundated with threats and abuse being sent to their offices, with some resorting to private fundraising to employ enough advisers to share the significant workload.
Politicians have been forced to turn off their office’s phone lines, order staff not to review constituent emails, and send their employees home to recuperate, amid a deluge of vitriol.
Threats against federal politicians are at an all-time high, with MPs on alert after the shock attack on Helen Haines on Monday. In the aftermath of the attack, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett confirmed that her force was charging one individual a week with threats to politicians.
NSW Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi told this masthead: “There have been times that I have had to tell staff to not answer the phones because all we are getting is calls of hate and abuse.”
Faruqi said the emotional impact of the high volume of threats that come into her office directly challenges her ability to provide assistance to constituents, at times frustrating those who wish to speak with her.
“We’ve often had training and support from the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service. I have counselling quite a bit from PWSS. Staff see social media, emails come through. There are phone calls as well. It hinders how we do our work,” Faruqi said.
Faruqi and independent senator Fatima Payman separately spoke of separate incidents this week in which pictures of human faeces had been sent to their email inboxes, distressing staff members employed to monitor legitimate correspondence from constituents.
Payman said her office this week missed an email from the AFP regarding the conviction of a Queensland man who targeted her with menacing voicemails, emails and social media messages because her relevant staff member was taking a mental health day after exposure to “sustained abusive” content.
“My staff are on the verge of breakdown and there is no practical way of sharing the burden without shutting the office entirely because, Labor, the party for workers doesn’t give a s--t about safety and wellbeing of the workers in my office,” Payman told this masthead.
After leaving the Labor Party to sit as an independent last term, the senator was not afforded the additional “personal staffing” allocation provided to other senators, leaving her with the equal lowest staffing allocation of any crossbencher in federal parliament.
Under federal legislation each MP is entitled to five electorate officers, but the provision of extra highly paid “personal staff” remains entirely under the prime minister’s discretion.
Anthony Albanese has been criticised for the way he grants staffing allocations, after both cutting the crossbench’s staffing following the 2022 election, and the opposition’s following the 2025 election.
On the Senate crossbench, Jacqui Lambie has three additional advisers, David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe each have two, and United Australia Party senator Ralph Babet has one. Payman and One Nation senator Tyron Whitten, both representing Western Australia, are the only senators to have no additional staff.
Payman has made repeated requests for additional staff, saying she cannot effectively represent Australia’s largest state without them. There has been no response to her requests.
Independent MP Nicolette Boele has made similar requests for increased staffing which have been declined. A teal independent representing the inner-Sydney electorate of Bradfield, Boele has one additional staffer while the five other teal independents each have two. A reason for this discrepancy has never been provided.
“As a woman in public life, I know the risks to me and my team are rising. Bradfield is also home to large Jewish and Chinese-Australian communities who are being targeted,” the MP told this masthead.
“We asked for more staff to keep my team safe and to properly support communities, and were turned down. We asked again after the Bondi attack last December, and were turned down again.”
Boele has had to privately fund a social media staffer to monitor online threats against her office. She said the current staffing arrangement isn’t “fair, safe or sustainable” for her office or the community she represents.
Both independent senator David Pocock and teal MP Sophie Scamps also use private fundraising efforts to employ staff.
Scamps said young female staff in her office were on the front line of filtering threats and harassment that come into the office, saying they were often “trying to protect me from the vile abuse that comes in often based on misinformation.”
A member of Scamps’ team recently stepped back from her job after feeling burnt out because of the amount of vitriol she was faced with daily.
“The aggression, the toxicity, it takes its toll, she’s now left. She was a beloved member of the team, but there’s only so much you can take,” Scamps said.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.