Former independent MP Cathy McGowan has warned that the attack on Helen Haines has struck at the heart of Australian democracy, revealing that women across the electorate fear for their safety and question whether they can enter public life without facing violence.
In an emotional address to hundreds of residents gathered at a community vigil in Wodonga on Wednesday night, McGowan said the assault on her Indi successor had left northeast Victoria grappling with grief, shame and the confronting reality that one of its own had been attacked in the community she represented.
Haines, 65, remains in a critical condition in hospital, having had both legs amputated after a Tarrawingee man drove into her outside her electorate office on Monday afternoon. Brendan Nugent, 43, made no application for bail when he fronted Wangaratta Magistrates Court on Wednesday morning.
“That this happened in our town, by one of our community members, to one of us: in the attack on Helen, it is an attack on all of us,” McGowan said. “It’s so very hard to get our minds around.”
McGowan said the community was confronting something far more profound than the shocking violence inflicted on a much-loved local MP. Flowers lined the front of Haines’s High Street electoral office in the border town on Wednesday, with handwritten well-wishes from the community.
“There is another level of grief, different and deeper from the actual violence, from the sorrow, the shame and the hurt,” McGowan said. “It’s about Helen in her role as our elected representative – in attacking her, we intuit that this is an attack on our political system, on our democracy.”
McGowan, whose historic 2013 election victory helped launch the modern community independents movement, said the attack had shaken the grassroots political culture that had defined Indi for more than a decade.
She said many of those who had helped elect Haines were struggling to comprehend how the democratic process they had worked to strengthen could become the target of such violence.
The former MP revealed Governor-General Sam Mostyn and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had both been in contact and asked her to convey their condolences to the community.
In a unified show of cross-party solidarity, state MPs Tim McCurdy, Bill Tilley, Cindy McLeish and Annabelle Cleeland joined nine local mayors from across northeast Victoria to condemn the growing wave of intimidation targeting public officials.
In a joint statement, the regional leaders warned that threats and violence “have absolutely no place in our democracy or in our communities”.
Civic leaders from Alpine, Benalla, Indigo, Mansfield, Murrindindi, Strathbogie, Towong, Wangaratta and Wodonga declared that while robust disagreement was essential to democracy, targeted harassment abandoned basic humanity.
“We should challenge our elected representatives, we should question their decisions, we should demand better of them. But there is a line,” they said.
Refusing to let hostility undermine civic participation, the cohort pledged that “decency still outweighs division” as they urged the public to reject political hatred and safeguard the standards of public service.
McGowan said conversations across Indi since Monday had exposed the deeper scars left by the attack, particularly among women already living with the threat of violence.
Many women are scared for their own safety and the safety of women in public positions, she said.
She acknowledged the anguish of Haines’ family and staff, the Wangaratta locals who intervened during the attack and the medical teams working to save the MP’s life.
She urged residents not to allow their grief to harden into fear or retreat from political participation and instead challenged the community to make next month’s Victorian election a demonstration of the democratic values that had been threatened.
“Let’s make it the best ever, not only here in [the electoral district of] Benambra but across Victoria,” she said.
McGowan said the response to Monday’s attack must be to strengthen, rather than surrender, the democratic culture those campaigns had helped build.
“My ask, in closing, is that we don’t let violence win, that we ensure the legacy of this attack on Helen will be a stronger, more vibrant and effective democracy,” she said. “And from a personal perspective, all candidates and especially women, know they can run for office and be safe.”