The first piece Helen Haines wrote for The Saturday Paper coincided with the establishment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission, a reform for which she was centrally responsible and a measure of her effectiveness and her sincere commitment to integrity.
She wrote with shaky optimism about a commission that would disappoint her.
“This week was a turning point in the struggle for integrity in federal politics,” she wrote. “We must keep moving, be ever vigilant and never stop working to be better.”
Those three entreaties are the model for her work in politics. It is what makes her different. She does not stop. She is immune to indulgence. She knows how much more there is to do.
This week is another turning point. The attack on her is an attack on democracy. It will change our politics and change the country.
Haines has lost both her legs. Her husband says her heart and mind remain strong. “Her heart is huge – she is a very compassionate, caring, loving person, incredibly supportive of all around her,” he says. “And her mind – she has the sharpest intellect. She has always had the most intense desire to learn, to read, to synthesise and to understand what’s going on.”
A little over a week before Haines was attacked, former Liberal candidate Nyunggai Warren Mundine opened the Conservative Political Action Conference in Brisbane with a joke about killing Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen. “I looked at him and my body language gave me away,” he said. “My mate had to grab me to say, ‘It doesn’t go well on your CV if you murder a federal minister.’ ”
In parliament, Gold Coast Liberal National MP Angie Bell said she would like to see Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Small Business Anne Aly “stoned in the square”.
A decade ago, Bob Katter released an election advert showing him smiling and blowing smoke from a pistol as two men represented as political opponents lay on the ground. A few years later, then Nationals MP George Christensen posted a picture of himself at a shooting range with the caption, “You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, greenie punks?”
These statements are all, in their own ways, connected. They are part of the dangerous coarsening of politics. They speak to the vicious shattering of democratic consensus, to a landscape of alienation in which the death of opponents becomes a punchline, in which seriousness is abandoned and replaced by violent memes. This is Gabby Giffords and Donald Trump and the brazen ending of truth.
An old Labor speechwriter used to observe that Indians cared more about democracy than Australians and that’s why they killed their leaders. Americans, too, he’d say. Like most jokes in politics, it was built from cynicism. In truth, the peacefulness of Australia’s politics is a direct result of the high regard given to it. That regard is what has been dismantled.
It is not possible to say what motivated Haines’s attacker. He has been charged and will be tried. It is possible, however, to say that political discourse has become dangerous and obscene. The institution Haines set out to improve has only degraded. The major parties have given up to the fringe. The media has broken down. Respect and decency are gone.
There is a way through. It begins with a return to civility and integrity. As Haines wrote, we must keep moving, be ever vigilant and never stop working to be better.