My thoughts this morning are with Helen Haines and her family. She is in a critical condition at The Alfred in Melbourne, and I hope, as so many Australians do, that she is able to recover from her injuries.
On Monday afternoon she was standing at the boot of her car outside her Wangaratta electorate office when a Toyota Land Cruiser hit her. According to the ABC’s live coverage, witnesses saw the driver make a U-turn, strike her against her own vehicle, reverse and hit her again. A bystander ran to the car and pulled him out.
This is shocking political violence, in a nation that has rarely faced anything like it.
No one deserves this. Helen deserves it least. A nurse and midwife before she entered Parliament in 2019, she has worked for transparency, integrity and action on climate with a decency that is rare on any side of politics. Victorian Premier Ben Carroll called her a “rare flower in public life” who has dedicated her life to caring for others. He is right.
What we know and what we don’t
A 43-year-old man was arrested at the scene. Police had “no recent intelligence” on him and are treating it as an isolated incident, though the Prime Minister says it was “a deliberate act”. The motive is unknown. I don’t know why this man did what he is accused of doing and neither does anyone else yet. What I do know is the ground this landed on.
The heat has been building
Condemnation has poured in from every side, and I believe it is genuine. I also wish it hadn’t taken this to wake so many people up to the rhetoric they have been farming. Health Minister Mark Butler says there have been more than 1,000 credible threats against MPs and office holders, double the figure from five years ago. Tanya Plibersek says “rape and death threats are regular”.
That didn’t happen by accident. Three groups turned up the heat, and each fed the next.
The commentators
Violent language has become a media genre. In May 2021 Sky News host Peta Credlin was accused of inciting violence over a remark about “baseball bats”, Daniel Andrews and Anthony Albanese. It was dressed up as a figure of speech. In 2017, 2GB guest Prue MacSween said she would be “tempted to run over” the writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied, and the station defended the comments as “light-hearted” and “non-literal”.
A joke about running someone over lands very differently when someone has just been run down. Commentators who trade in this stuff know what they are doing. It earns clicks, ratings and a loyal audience, and the audience hears the permission.
The politicians
Only last week, Liberal frontbencher Angie Bell said the Prime Minister and the small business minister should be “shamed and stoned in the square”. She withdrew the remark. The withdrawal always travels slower than the line it retracts, and the line lingers.
In 2021, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said of Melbourne’s Covid ordeal that in country areas “we couldn’t really give a shit” and “you can almost smell the burning flesh from here”. Labor’s Andrew Giles called it “disgusting, divisive and unworthy of the office of the deputy prime minister”. Joyce is “disgusted” by Monday’s attack and I take him at his word. But contempt from a deputy prime minister for millions of his fellow citizens teaches people who it is acceptable to hate.
The anonymous accounts
Then it all lands on social media, where it is amplified, sharpened and aimed at individuals by accounts nobody can identify. As The Guardian’s Benita Kolovos reported, Carroll says we are living in a “more polarised” world driven by algorithms:
In this post-fact information system, there are no consequences for what goes on on online platforms. I’ve complained to Meta and X, and I just get the email back [saying] there’s no breach of any duties there. People can put up continuously misinformation and disinformation online, and there’s no consequences.
That is the wild west. Slurs and threats can be slung from an account made in thirty seconds, and Meta (Facebook, Instagram and Threads) is the biggest player with the least apparent regard for what its algorithms and its flood of anonymous accounts produce.
Take away the masks
I know women who stood for local council and refused to run again because of the misogynistic and highly sexualised attacks they faced. Men have been threatened with violence too, by anonymous cowards.
The simplest fix is to eliminate anonymous accounts. If you want to post, you should be identifiable and accountable for what you say. That would immediately thin out the hordes of keyboard cowards who say online what they would never have the nerve to say to someone’s face. Whistleblowers and people escaping abusers have good reasons to stay hidden, but a platform can verify who you are while the public sees only a handle. That is a design problem, not a reason to do nothing.
It won’t fix everything. Some high-profile personalities are happy to pump out divisive hate speech and freeload on the algorithmically charged reactions to build their fame. Perhaps this horrible week gives them pause.
While they casually demonise migrants, the biggest risks look home grown. The sovereign citizen who shot two police officers dead at his Porepunkah property last year was not an import. Police shot him dead in March as they moved to apprehend him. His home, as it happens, was in Indi, the electorate Helen Haines represents.
Those who seek to divide the nation and demonise our neighbours should not be rewarded at the ballot box. Our country is far from perfect and we should demand more from our governments. But the answer is not tearing down good people like Helen Haines and electing ill-thought quasi anarchists who are full of whinges but short on real solutions, pumped up by a broken media desperately chasing clicks. They have all the substance of fairy floss and are about as useful.
Vote for the people who turn up, listen and do the work. Helen Haines has done that for Indi for years, and she deserves all of our respect for doing so.
I am shattered by what has happened to Helen, and by the consequences it will have on many future potential political candidates, especially women. Politics should be a robust contest of the best ideas, not reduced to some sort of costume wrestling laced with taunts and invective.
The “media commentators” who casualise talk of “baseball bats” should wake up to themselves and reflect on how they have contributed to this heated environment. So should the politicians and public figures who have been quick to reach for the cheap line. Those of us with a platform, large or small, need to think very carefully about our words and do all we can to turn down the division and conflict.
Debate ideas absolutely. Pursue your differences of policy as hard as you like. But let’s not dumb it down to a primitive battle of threats.
Sources:
- Live: Burke says Helen Haines was ‘rammed’ twice in attack as MP remains critical - ABC News
- Australian MP Helen Haines critically injured in ‘deliberate’ car ramming - Al Jazeera
- Victorian premier urges focus on online hate and misogyny - Benita Kolovos, The Guardian
- Barnaby Joyce urged to apologise over ‘burning flesh’ comments about Melbourne’s Covid impact - Daniel Hurst, The Guardian
- I’d be tempted to run over Yassmin Abdel-Magied, commentator says - Naaman Zhou, The Guardian
- Peta Credlin - Wikipedia (cites Amanda Meade, The Guardian, 28 May 2021)