Opinion
Moments like these are always painfully hard to process. We’re trying to make sense of things at precisely the time we know the least, when the facts are still emerging, and each new detail seems to alter the meaning of what came before. That clashes with our need for certainty, to impose meaning on things. And here, there are two irresistible temptations: to generalise from the specific tragedy in front of us, and to seek the explanation that exonerates ourselves.
That helps explain much of the online discourse in the wake of the awful (now formally alleged) attack on Helen Haines. No meaningful information about the alleged perpetrator was necessary before people were prepared to point the finger at One Nation, or alternatively to assume it was all a case of mistaken identity, and that a One Nation politician was actually the target.
Here, we see the familiar pattern of people attempting to categorise an attack as the responsibility of one’s political foes, to preserve the categorisation of good and bad guys we’ve already established.
The first problem with this is that it rushes well ahead of what we know: in this case, police are yet even to allege a motive, let alone assign a political affiliation. Another is that even if both guilt and motive could be established, we’d be dealing with a single case. To extrapolate from that is dangerously loose, especially in a time like ours when political violence is becoming a broader phenomenon in liberal democracies: increasingly accepted, and increasingly common.
But perhaps the main worry is that it overlooks the more expansive problem: that violence so often begets violence. Once you introduce it into a political ecosystem, you make it a feasible way of doing politics. And from there it’s unlikely to be contained to one ideology or another.
That is, violence soon enough becomes a condition. Each particular event, even the most tragic, is a symptom of an underlying disease. And once you reach that point, the task is not merely to point at the infected, as though they can neatly be quarantined from us, as though we haven’t been breathing the same air as them. Instead, we can only undertake the difficult, thankless work of considering our own part in things.
Here, it’s fair to say the nation has done a fair amount of soul-searching this week about the state of its political conversation. The prime minister implores people to “turn down the temperature”. In this, he repeats both himself and the longstanding advice of ASIO boss Mike Burgess. Andrew Hastie says the task is to “be a better steward of Australian democracy”, and that “the worst thing we can do right now is point fingers at our political opponents”. Hastie might have had cause do to just that, given One Nation’s branding of him as a traitor in one of its cartoons.
Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson has seen fit to apologise for, and remove, a different cartoon mocking Jacqui Lambie for the vaginal prolapse she acquired from her time in the military. Previously, she thought Lambie should “get over it”. Maybe Hanson’s change of heart is a concession to political pressure. But at a time like this, maybe you take your wins wherever you can.
I don’t know how long this mood change will last in Australian politics. My guess is not very long before muscle memory kicks in, and the familiar hostilities resume. Resets like this are acute in the full sense of that term: they are sharp, but short-lived. They remind me of when the 2010 election delivered a hung parliament and each of the major parties had to persuade the crossbench to help it form government. I remember Tony Abbott proposing a “kinder, gentler polity”. Then I remember how swiftly the brutality resumed.
But actually, I’m less interested in how our politicians respond from here. Focusing on that, too, can be a form of self-exoneration – as though citizens are not participants in our political culture. And I think a moment like this is issuing us a challenge more subtle than we’re inclined to realise.
Yes, it matters how we speak to one another. But maybe the problem is we’re too obsessed with speaking. It might matter even more how well we listen.
No one seems to mention that. This is not an age of listening. It’s an age of shouting, of performing, of posturing. It’s an age of talking about, not with. By now we’re familiar with the forums that exacerbate this: the online silos, the increasingly shrill, partisan media outlets, for example. One consequence is that we do not let our political foes speak for themselves. Instead, we get them pre-packaged by others in our tribe. We do not learn their motivations, we assign them. We do not try to understand them on their own terms, in ways they would themselves recognise. We grasp them mostly as caricature. As grist for our own mill. Then we conclude they are beyond the pale.
That includes politicians. Often we complain they don’t listen to us, and occasionally we’re right. But it’s not clear we’re especially interested in listening to them. Recently in my broadcast work, I’ve noticed a startling new kind of audience complaint. It’s not about what some politician has said in an interview. It’s about the mere fact an outlet spoke to them in the first place. Audiences who want to hear nothing of One Nation. Or of the official opposition. Or of the prime minister. That’s a kind of politics where the contest isn’t over ideas. It’s over legitimacy.
That doesn’t mean we’re all about to resort to violence. But it does mean we’re fulfilling one of its preconditions. Political violence is not something you inflict on those you see as people. You have to make them unpeople first. Politicians are the ultimate unpeople. Violence against them – whoever they are – therefore becomes imaginable in a special way. We can, and should demand they set a better tone. But that’s unlikely to amount to much if we’re quite happy being tone deaf.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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