‘Chaff bag’ to ‘Hang Dan Andrews’: Australian politics has been turning up the heat for years

Indi MP Helen Haines has had a leg amputated and remains in a critical condition in a Melbourne hospital after being hit more than once by a car near her electorate office in Wangaratta, north-east Victoria, on Monday. Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush said this morning he believes the attack was deliberate, but that the full motivation was “subject to ongoing investigations”.

Counter-terrorism police are investigating, and a man has been charged with causing harm to a Commonwealth public official, dangerous driving causing serious injury, and intentionally causing serious injury. More charges may follow.

The alleged attack on Haines, politically motivated or not, is the most extreme act of violence aimed at an Australian politician since the 1994 murder of John Newman, and has taken on a sickly inevitable quality in the aftermath. It has propelled a discussion about “lowering the temperature” of the country’s political climate, which has been slowly rising for more than 15 years. How did we get here?

2011–19: Ugly Australia

In March 2011, roughly a year after Julia Gillard contentiously ousted her predecessor Kevin Rudd to become prime minister, then opposition leader Tony Abbott and several other high-profile Coalition MPs attended a rally outside Parliament House organised by opponents of the government’s proposed carbon tax. Abbott spoke in front of placards saying things like “Ditch the witch” and “JuLIAR … Bob Brown’s bitch”. Abbott later said he “regretted” and “did not endorse” the language.

In July, letters were sent to members of the press gallery, featuring images of Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson with the caption “WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE”. The Australian, while arguing that anger against Gillard’s government was neither “surprising nor illegitimate”, called the letter “yet another ugly example of how the political mood in this country is particularly vicious, and that calls to violence are becoming more common — although hardly mainstream”.

The same month, Alan Jones used his high-rating breakfast program to say Gillard was “off her tree, and quite frankly they should shove her and Bob Brown in a chaff bag and take them as far out to sea as they can and tell them to swim home”. By 2012, Facebook pages with titles like “I Hate Julia Gillard” had tens of thousands of likes.

In June 2013, independent MP Rob Oakeshott gave a valedictory speech in which he described some of the rhetoric of the previous three years as “disgusting”.

“They cannot be accepted, whatever happens from hereon. We have to find a way to get back in control of the public square, and this is the place where that happens. The fringe has invaded the middle; it has to be put back on the fringe … The nation needs to deal with it; this parliament needs to deal with it. I have been shocked, frankly, over the last three years to meet ugly Australia, and just to see the width and depth of ugly Australia. I leave here optimistic. I am proud of my country … but we have got to deal with ugly Australia — we have got to deal with it somehow.”

After he led the Liberals to victory in September 2013, Abbott was also subject to a great deal of violent imagery. At a marriage equality rally in late December that year, a Socialist Alternative banner depicted him being hanged by a rainbow noose. In mid-2014, an image of Abbott getting his throat cut, accompanied by the headline “One cut we’d like to see”, appeared on the front page of Red Flag.

COVID: The turning point

When Crikey’s Cam Wilson surveyed the social media history of Dezi Freeman, who would later murder two police and injure another in the name of sovereign citizen ideology, March 2020 marked a turning point in his posting. It began to take on a more and more extremist tone, depicting then premier Daniel Andrews as North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, and, in 2021, speculating that Andrews was lying about how he had sustained a serious back injury.

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Freeman, however, was expressing nothing more extreme than what would be implied by the shadow attorney-general and, later, the state’s most-read newspaper, the Herald Sun, on its front page.

Victoria’s response to the pandemic, with its long strict lockdowns and overzealous policing, combined with broader pandemic-management measures like vaccine mandates, was accompanied by an increasingly angry and conspiratorial tone bleeding into mainstream politics.

In late 2021, a Victorian pandemic management bill triggered protests that compared Andrews to Hitler. In one case, a gallows was erected outside Victoria’s Parliament, with protesters posing with nooses and chanting “Hang Dan Andrews”. Four Liberal MPs joined that protest.

In the lead-up to the 2022 election, a candidate for the anti-lockdown Freedom Party posted to Twitter that Andrews should be “arrested, tried, found guilty and hanged” (the Victorian Liberals preferenced her ahead of Labor). Elsewhere, state MP Catherine Cumming told a crowd during the campaign, “I joined the Angry Victorians Party for one reason — to make Daniel Andrews turn into red mist.”

During the same campaign, a Liberal candidate had to apologise for declaring Andrews would be brought to justice for the “murder” of Victorians.

Recent years

In 2020-21, there were 279 reports of threats and harassment against federal parliamentarians to the Australian Federal Police. In 2021-22, during which there was a federal election, the number rose to 555. In 2022-23, when there was a Victorian election, these reports increased to 709. By 2023-24, there were more than 1,000.

In June 2024, Labor MP Josh Burns’ St Kilda office was attacked and set on fire by pro-Palestine activists.

Ahead of the August 2025 anti-immigration March for Australia, organiser “Bec Freedom” was confronted by 2GB host Ben Fordham with an audio clip of her saying, “We need violence, I’m sorry, but we need fucking violence.” Freedom later apologised. The March for Australia was attended and addressed by Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter and other MPs from Katter’s Australian Party.

In August, it was reported that Anthony Albanese had 20 ongoing court matters in which people are accused of making violent threats against him, and that he had “spent weeks away from his Sydney residence earlier this year as the government bolstered security and built a blast-resistant safety bunker in Kirribilli House”.

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By September 2026, police were looking into multiple instances of violent threats directed at NSW Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty. A Sydney man was sentenced after being found guilty of threatening, via email, to kill federal MP Anika Wells and her family. Further cases were being heard concerning harassment or threats against NSW MP Liesl Tesch and South Australian MP Nat Cook.

At this month’s CPAC, chair Warren Mundine said that, once when he encountered Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen, “My mate had to grab me to say, ‘It doesn’t go well on your CV if you murder a federal minister.’” The joke “revived a fading crowd”, the ABC reported.

Last week, Liberal MP Angie Bell told parliament that Albanese and Small Business Minister Anne Aly “should be absolutely shamed and stoned in the square” for one of their policies. Aly later said she’d had 19 death threats that week.

On Monday, October 19, an AFP spokesperson told The Mandarin that the agency had received “1,067 reports of harassing, nuisance, offensive and threatening behaviour towards high office holders, federal parliamentarians, electorate offices and protected establishments” in 2025-26.