We still don’t know what motivated the attack on independent MP Helen Haines, who suffered critical injuries and remains in hospital in Melbourne after an alleged assailant “rammed” her twice with a car yesterday. But we do know that the level of threats against MPs, and particularly female MPs, has surged in recent years, amid a general rise in online hate, abuse, misogyny and extremism both in the political sphere and outside it.
But regardless of whether the attack on Haines is proven to be politically motivated or not, rather than it being any sort of sombering moment or turning point, it will likely turn out to be another step along a path to greater violence and hostility in politics. One doesn’t even need to look to the death throes of the US state, and its persistent level of political violence, to see that.
Over the past decade in the United Kingdom, shock over the murder of two MPs did nothing to forestall a significant rise in the number of crimes against politicians, or the brutal alleged murder of former Conservative MP and Reform UK spokesperson Ann Widdecombe earlier this year. As her murder — not to mention the repeated assassination attempts on Donald Trump — showed, politically motivated killings are by no means any sort of prerogative of the far right. Ask Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns, who had his office firebombed by pro-Palestine activists in 2024.
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Indeed, in Australia, the murder of two Queensland police officers and a neighbour by extremists in Wieambilla in 2022 also failed to mark any sort of turning point in ideological violence here, given the Porepunkah murders of two officers less than three years later. We can all say “this isn’t us”, but it’s becoming us.
The causes? Take your pick — and people will, according to their own biases, so take these with a grain of salt.
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The economy, yes, both in very straightforward and perhaps more nebulous ways. We’re into our second bout of inflation after decades of it declining, living standards have gone backwards, and economic precarity — the sense of only just hanging on — has worsened. The major political parties, meanwhile, don’t appear to have a solution. A large chunk of voters have rushed to One Nation, the main “a plague on both their houses” brand, despite the fact its policies would grievously worsen the economy.
As a community independent MP dedicated to representing her voters rather than a political brand, Helen Haines would be an absurd target for economic resentment, if that’s revealed as a motive. A growing number of voters think the current system is discredited tout court, but Haines represents the best the current system has to offer, not the failings of two inept and visionless major parties.
Or there’s social media, the stock villain of so many analyses that it’s sometimes quicker to work out what it isn’t responsible for. Perhaps it’s more accurate to see social media as part of a broader online ecosystem that initially promised to connect and inform people, but which has now been monetised into a trillion-dollar division machine dedicated to dividing and alienating us to keep us scrolling. It’s likely only one way in which the now-ubiquitous experience of being online is rewiring our brains — something only likely to accelerate with AI — in ways we may not understand for decades.
Sections of the legacy media have followed the example of social media. News Corp’s entire business model has for decades been dedicated to telling its ageing consumers whom to hate and why, with a regular target being community independents who oppose Liberals. But this fostering of resentment, however ill-founded, has been not only a media phenomenon but also a political one.
In Australia, the Coalition, the long-term masters of exploiting grievance (remember John Howard and Tim Fischer responding to native title with fake maps of claimable land and promises of “bucketloads of extinguishment” in the 1990s), have been left behind by Pauline Hanson, who for decades has traded on the sole trick of saying the quiet racist/misogynist/bigoted bit out loud.
Hanson is absolutely not the first politician to trade in racism in recent decades: Whitlam-era Labor was hostile toward Vietnamese refugees; John Howard attacked Asian immigrants in the 1980s. She has, however, made an unabashed virtue of it. After her return to politics in 2016, and drawing inspiration from her hero, Donald Trump, Hanson has repeatedly lowered the tone of public discourse.
Most recently in June, Andrew Hastie blamed One Nation’s vilification of him, due to his stance against Ben Roberts-Smith, for why he was given additional security. Instead of toning things down, the party published a cartoon in July labelling him “a traitor”. That Haines was attacked the very day that Hanson was deriding Jacqui Lambie for taking offence at One Nation’s mockery of her vaginal prolapse, and demanding that the Tasmanian senator “have a bit of a laugh” at a condition that hundreds of thousands of Australian women suffer from, was exemplary timing for a political operator who more than anyone else in the country has fostered a darker, nastier and more hateful political tone.
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None of that seems really sufficient, however, to explain the general tenor of political communication currently. Things have markedly deteriorated since the pandemic. Something seems to have broken during that two-year caesura from ordinary life: some people became rabid haters of governments; others aggressively embraced them as saviours; conspiracy theories became a standard part of the political and media lexicon.
The experience of Victoria, the most locked-down state, might be illustrative: the surge in aggressive right-wing conspiracy theories and fascist protests, which often erupted into violence; the aggressive intolerance of Andrews government supporters, incapable of handling even the most justified criticism; the collapse in basic governance and integrity; the surge in debt.
None of these causes, especially when combined in the toxic mix that is the world of the mid-2020s, is disappearing any time soon. Economic precarity and other challenges to standards of living will likely only increase. Tech giants will only find new ways to monetise our brains. Public interest journalism will likely vanish altogether. The language of politics will grow worse. The temperature will keep rising, despite politicians on all sides calling for everyone to cool it down. It would be nice to predict otherwise, but that would be to defy the evidence.