Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett has drawn a direct link between inflamed rhetoric from politicians and the rise in violent threats, announcing that authorities were probing the mental health and political views of the man who allegedly attacked independent MP Helen Haines.
A day after Haines’ condition improved from critical to serious but stable, Barrett said police were being inundated with serious threats to parliamentarians leading to one person a week being charged with criminal offences.
She echoed ASIO boss Mike Burgess in saying that language and announcements from the nation’s leaders had an observable effect on the volume and nature of threats.
“It does have a direct correlation to what we see in terms of threats and abuse, and sometimes it’s very immediate,” she said on ABC’s Insiders on Sunday morning, also raising the alarm on drug use in Australia.
Asked about a satirical One Nation cartoon in which former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews is run over by a car, she added: “We do see examples where there are particular announcements or things like you’ve just described, [where] there is a reaction”.
“My hope is that this really causes people to pause and have a think about what’s happening in this country and the impact of that. And if this is not the incident [that causes change], then what is?”
The attack on Haines outside her office in north-east Victoria shocked the nation and led to a week of introspection about polarisation and the tone of politics. Politicians return to Canberra on Monday, when most of the day will be spent on tributes for the widely respected MP. Labor is also working on a package of security measures to improve safety for politicians.
Barrett said part of her job when she began work at the AFP was to sift through handwritten threats to elected officials. Now, she said, her day often started with reading a pages-long report on threats to MPs.
“These days, of course, you can sit behind a keyboard and you can bash out a threat or abuse very, very quickly,” she said.
“It’s roughly 50/50 in terms of the gender of federal parliamentarians. There is no doubt that the nature of the threats and the abuse that is targeted at female parliamentarians is … sexual violence threats.”
‘These days, of course, you can sit behind a keyboard and you can bash out a threat or abuse very, very quickly.’
AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett
“We are not here to police free speech. We are not here to intervene in political discourse. But I would challenge any Australian to read some of these threats ... and for anyone to argue that it is free speech or political discourse.”
Barrett said the investigation into 43-year-old Brendan Nugent was focused partly on widespread reports of mental ill health as well as the “causes or issues that he has aligned himself with”.
Nugent has a history of posting online about logging and environmentalism, and more recently became fixated on the war in Gaza. Authorities are also looking into the relationship between Nugent and his father and stepmother, who are friends with Haines.
The federal police chief raised the alarm on Australia’s relatively high volume of drug consumption, telling users: “You are fuelling not just an organised crime environment, but it’s a national security threat.”
“We need to be having a conversation about this as a country,” she said. “We are seizing more drugs throughout the Pacific than we have ever seized by far. We know that we’re still paying really high prices for drugs in this country.”
Large US tech firms should be working more closely with authorities to clam down on radicalism, she added.
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