We don’t yet know whether politics motivated the Monday attack that left independent member of parliament Helen Haines critically injured outside her Wangaratta office. But while we wait for investigators to establish the motive, we still have cause to worry about our growing difficulty in accepting that democracy doesn’t always deliver the decisions we want.
Australia has experienced political violence before. In 1966, opposition leader Arthur Calwell survived an assassination attempt outside Sydney’s Mosman Town Hall. In 1994, New South Wales MP John Newman was murdered outside his Cabramatta home. Neither incident occurred in an age of social media algorithms or online echo chambers.
In 2001, Justice John Dunford sentenced Phuong Ngo to life imprisonment for organising the murder. Ngo wanted Newman’s parliamentary seat. Rather than wait for the democratic process, he arranged to have his political opponent killed. Dunford found that political ambition motivated the crime and treated the killing of an MP for political ends as an aggravating circumstance.
Think about what Ngo did. He wasn’t simply removing someone he disliked. He was attempting to secure political office by eliminating an opponent. In doing so, he sought to replace the judgement of voters with his own.
Of course, most political disputes bear no resemblance to Newman’s murder. Nor should we suggest that anyone who holds extreme views or engages in disruptive protest is somehow on the path to violence.
Australians are entitled to hold extreme political beliefs. They’re entitled to argue for them, organise around them and peacefully protest in their name. Those freedoms are essential to democracy. What they don’t have is an entitlement to use violence or criminal intimidation to force others to accept their preferred political outcomes.
That shouldn’t be controversial. Yet I wonder whether we are becoming less willing to accept the principle behind it.
We increasingly encounter political arguments that leave little room for disagreement. Opponents are no longer said to be simply wrong; they’re supposed to be corrupt, dangerous or morally bankrupt. Political decisions aren’t merely unpopular; they’re allegedly evidence that democracy has been captured or betrayed.
Social media didn’t create this behaviour, but it has given it extraordinary reach. Algorithms repeatedly expose people to views they already agree with. Outrage attracts attention. Nuance rarely does. After spending enough time surrounded by this artificially concentrated agreement, it becomes easier to mistake your own convictions for those of the wider community.
Then a government makes a decision you fundamentally oppose.
For some, the response is no longer to persuade others, organise politically or accept an electoral setback. It is to question whether the decisionmakers have any legitimacy at all.
We see elements of this across the political spectrum. Those on the extreme left and right offer different explanations for society’s problems but often share a tendency to identify enemies and offer simplistic solutions. Political leaders and commentators aren’t immune from contributing to this environment either.
I am not suggesting that offensive political speech is the same as violence. Nor am I suggesting that online hostility explains what happened to Haines. We have no established basis for either argument, at least not yet.
My concern is that we’re losing sight of the difference between having a right to challenge a decision and believing we have a right to determine its outcome.
Governments routinely make decisions about defence, infrastructure, energy, investment and public expenditure that people strongly oppose. Some of those decisions will be wrong. Some will have serious consequences for particular communities. Australians should challenge them, demand explanations and campaign to have them overturned.
But ministers, regulators and parliamentarians cannot exercise their responsibilities if threats and intimidation become part of the decision-making calculation.
Once fear begins determining public decisions, the consequences extend beyond the individual being threatened. Those using intimidation acquire influence that other Australians, exercising their democratic rights peacefully, do not have.
Our criminal law already recognises that the purpose behind an offence can affect its seriousness. The Newman judgment demonstrates why. It wasn’t Ngo’s political beliefs that made the murder an attack on democracy. It was his decision to use criminal violence to pursue political power.
There’s no need to criminalise unpopular opinions or treat ordinary protest as a security threat. But we need to be much clearer about the distinction between democratic participation and coercion.
One of Australia’s strengths is that our politicians remain relatively accessible. We expect them to attend community meetings, walk through shopping centres, visit local businesses and hear directly from people who disagree with them. I don’t want to see that disappear behind increasingly elaborate security arrangements.
But preserving that accessibility also requires Australians to accept something that appears increasingly unfashionable. Other people have the same democratic rights we do, including the right to disagree with us and elect governments whose decisions we dislike.
Democracy gives us access to our politicians and a right to have our say. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee that we get our way.
We need to preserve the first and accept the second.
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