When Catherine King was elected to federal parliament 25 years ago, she would spend plenty of time in the open with constituents: chatting to them across her reception desk and travelling around her regional Victorian electorate with a caravan that doubled as a mobile office.
“That now has changed,” she said, in one of several interviews with the ABC this week. “There’s now Perspex barriers between you, there are security cameras and a security entrance as well – and that is just from the office perspective. I don’t do mobile offices in my caravan any more. It was not deemed safe to do because there’s no second [exit] point for me to go if something happens.”
Now a federal minister, King still makes an effort to stand outside local markets on the weekends, where people can approach her. “The very job of a politician is actually talking and listening to people,” she said. But it’s not rare to be accosted on the street by people who can be verbally aggressive.
There have been other changes to the daily rhythm of political life. King no longer advertises where she’s going to be in advance, and more of her interactions with people are over the phone. “I don’t think you could talk to any MPs, male or female, that wouldn’t say that they’ve had some sort of death threat at some point,” she said.
Those threats are escalating. Some come through telephone answering machines overnight – they can be the first thing staff hear when they arrive in the morning.
Many are online. King recalled a time that a former MP made comments about her on his Facebook page. “Suddenly, I had the AFP saying someone locally had put my home address up on a Telegram chat group, and saying ‘we should, we’ll sort her out, we’ll get her’,” she said.
This was just one of dozens of anecdotes that MPs across the political divide shared this week, as Monday’s attack on independent MP Helen Haines has emphasised the increasingly risky political environment.
Rising threats
Australian Federal Police commissioner Krissy Barrett on Wednesday said that her national security investigation teams were charging almost one person every week, for targeting federal MPs or high office holders.
Politicians with high profiles and controversial portfolios are often targets. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spent weeks away from his Sydney residence this year as the government built a blast-resistant safety bunker in Kirribilli House. King said her cabinet colleague Chris Bowen has had to enlist personal protective services because his climate change portfolio is so contentious.
Some MPs have been issued personal duress alarms and their staff have to complete security training. Homes are regularly assessed by officials from the AFP and Home Affairs department.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson this week said she has taken on full-time protection because of increased threats, something she hasn’t required since 1998. Her colleague Barnaby Joyce revealed he had been in a disturbingly similar situation to the attack on Haines.
“I’ve also been in a position where a person has done a U-turn on the road and have flown across in their car to attack me,” Joyce told ABC radio. “I was just very, very lucky that day … [I had] personal protection with me, federal police with me, and they jumped in front of the guy and put their hand on his bull bar.”
Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie was recently told he needed security upgrades at both his home and electorate office. “The Minister for Home Affairs approached me about that and said that I had been identified. It was over the last six months, particularly, that I’ve come under sustained abuse online,” Hastie told the ABC’s 7.30.
Even as an independent senator for the ACT, David Pocock has been forced to move home. “It just seemed like everyone knew where I lived and things got ... yeah. I mean, there were a couple of incidents,” Pocock said on Wednesday.
“What we’ve seen this week and what we all know is that what I cop is nothing compared to what my female colleagues cop on a daily basis. And if you want to hear stories of harassment, and of just vile phone calls, emails, comments – talk to basically any female MP.”
Female MPs often face particularly gendered, sexualised and violent threats and abuse. “I couldn’t even count the number of death threats, rape threats that I’ve had over the years,” Labor minister Tanya Plibersek told 7.30.
Plibersek doesn’t advertise where she’s going to be on social media, and chooses instead to letterbox her local community. She will post photos after she’s left an event, rather than during, if there isn’t security around.
Unfortunately, abuse has always come with the job. Years ago, someone came in person to her house, and slipped a note under her front door saying they hoped her children died of painful cancers. “The thing that’s changed most is the industrial scale of that abuse now. And there’s always been abuse, but I am shocked by the tenor of it,” Plibersek said.
Just this week, Plibersek made a social media post defending Senator Jacqui Lambie against a One Nation cartoon that mocked her experience of vaginal prolapse. “Someone wrote under that post, defending Jacqui Lambie, that ‘she deserves to meet a LandCruiser’.”
This abuse is often compounded by racism. Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi said two instances of online harassment against her had led to criminal charges in the past year, while a handful of other threats were being investigated by the AFP.
The latest example was referred to law enforcement just this week. The email in question, seen by this masthead, said: “Go back to your own country you c--- or you’ll cop a bullet some time soon. You’re the only f------ invasive species here in Australia. You don’t belong here you c--- dog.”
Within a couple of hours, the same account had sent another email, with an image of faeces in a toilet. This week, Faruqi has also seen AI-generated videos of herself that were of a sexual nature. They disturbed her so much, she threw up.
“I want to do my work and I want to do it fully, but women especially have to consider so many things now. It is compounding for women, for women of colour, for First Nations women,” she said. “It cannot be divorced from a crisis of violence against women we are seeing in this country, of increasing racism and misogyny.”
Independent senator Lidia Thorpe, who is Indigenous, this week said she has taken to wearing disguises, such as hats and sunglasses, when shopping in public for fear of confrontation with members of the public.
Where to next?
Amid repeated calls for the “temperature to be turned down”, there have been few concrete suggestions about exactly how to protect MPs.
AFP Commissioner Barrett said it would take “an incredible amount of resourcing” to provide personal security to all 226 federal MPs, so agencies prioritised those at greatest risk.
Importantly, politicians don’t want 24/7 security, nor to hide away. Many MPs this week said boosting their security presence risked cutting them off from their constituents, some of whom already perceived them as cloistered. Others feared it would hamper their ability to serve and support people.
Independent MP Monique Ryan said more security for MPs would “detract from certainly my enjoyment of the job, but also my ability to engage with people on the streets as much as I would like”.
Assistant Citizenship Minister Julian Hill told News24 many people in his outer suburban electorate came from countries with higher risk profiles, saying: “I don’t want us to ever get to that point, ever, where public officials have to be followed around by security details en masse. I don’t want that for our country.”
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor echoed the sentiment, saying it was a strength of Australian democracy and that he still drove his own car to press conferences.
Liberal senator Maria Kovacic, however, said she was already cautious about attending nighttime events on her own, particularly when it meant walking a distance to her car alone at night. She will at times choose to pay for an Uber in circumstances where Commonwealth cars aren’t supported.
Kovacic said many people already felt politicians live in a different world from their own, and that engaging with the public was both an essential part of the job and an important way to counter that perception. She said everyday Australians needed to feel safe and empowered to consider becoming MPs themselves, but the events of this week risked compromising that.
“She [Haines] is someone that has entered the parliament for the right reason, to serve her community. She’s not been a divisive figure. She’s done everything textbook right, everything that a community would expect, and she was attacked in such a horrific way. What does that say about how safe anybody else can be?”
More from our Helen Haines coverage
- Suspect named: Police had attended the property of the man arrested
- Turn down the temperature: Spy chief’s urgent warning on violent rhetoric
- Jacqueline Maley: Sinister meme appeared hours before the attack
- Hero barber: Ricky thought it was a car accident. Then he saw the knife
- What we know: The attack on Helen Haines
- From the archives: Why Helen Haines decided to run for parliament
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