More Australians think political violence is sometimes justified than go to church each week. Actually, it’s not even close. Last year’s McKinnon index – the best measure we have – had 9 per cent of us entertaining violence. If we confine that to the adult population, that amounts to around 2 million people. Compare that to about 1.35 million weekly churchgoers, according to the National Church Life Survey. All those figures are a year old. But if I’m reading our social temperature correctly, that gap would only have widened.
This week gave us the revelation from Small Business Minister Anne Aly that she has received 19 death threats in the past week. It came in response to a Liberal MP who said in parliament that both she and the prime minister should be “stoned in the square” after the Australian Taxation Office decided not to let businesses pay tax by credit card. Those comments are obviously inflammatory, but they aren’t the definitive part of this story, because Aly’s experience is not an aberration. It’s increasingly becoming a fixture in our political culture. The federal police say there are around three threats made against federal politicians every day.
But it’s not just politicians. Merely working in a political office will do. Between politicians and their staffers, one survey found 85 per cent have had to deal with violent, threatening and volatile behaviour from the public. That runs the gamut from stalking and bomb threats, to office vandalism and being spat on. And it happens at every level of government. One mayor in western Sydney had her car torched.
Most of these incidents never end up in court. Even so, about 40 people have been charged with Commonwealth crimes for threatening federal politicians and high office holders in little more than the past year. The news doesn’t often detail them, but it recently told us of a case heard in a Perth court where a man allegedly threatened to kill Pauline Hanson. There are about 20 cases currently before the courts concerning threats to the prime minister alone. Parliament House has spent $150 million on security upgrades in the past decade.
We could, if we like, dismiss all this as empty talk. The man charged with threatening Hanson has described his posts as “stupid” and “crazy”, and said he didn’t mean them literally. And it’s true that in the majority of cases, we’ll be talking about mice who roar anonymously with no genuine intent: people who, if they ever found the police at their door one day, would be genuinely shocked it had all become so serious. But it’s not true that this is necessarily where things end. We have plenty of overseas case studies to make that plain.
Of course, it would be easy to dwell on America. You could probably fill in the details yourself. Attempted assassinations of Donald Trump (probably three), Nancy Pelosi and a conservative Supreme Court judge. Successful ones on Charlie Kirk, and Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman (as well as her husband). It might look like a sudden, heightened surge. But actually, these events were the culmination of a process, in which people generally became more accepting of violence as a legitimate political tool over years.
As you’d expect in America, there’s endless polling to this effect. Probably the most instructive comes from the University of Chicago. It found that in 2021, Americans legitimated political violence at about the rate Australians do now: 10 per cent. Then when researchers asked what sort of violence they had in mind, more than half of these said assassination. Cut to today, and that 10 per cent is now somewhere between 14 and 21 per cent. And when asked about real-life events – the assassination of Kirk and the attempted one of Pelosi – 10 per cent in each case said it was acceptable.
Britain has less data. But what it has is surprisingly familiar: somewhere between 15 and 21 per cent say political violence can be legitimate. And now, it has its own gruesome episode: Reform UK politician Ann Widdecombe killed by 21 hammer blows to the head in her own home. Prosecutors this week alleged in court that her assailant was “politically and ideologically motivated”, having a “particular hostility to Reform”. If that’s true, I presume his political motivation is the opposite of Thomas Mair, who shot and stabbed UK Labour MP Jo Cox to death in 2016. Cox and Widdecombe were on opposite sides of the Brexit debate, and on most others as well. And between those two, in 2021, an Islamist terrorist murdered Conservative MP David Amess.
I don’t think it’s right to presume, as a rule, that our politics simply replicates America’s or Britain’s on a five- or 10-year delay. Each country has its own political traditions, pathologies and experiences. So much of their recent politics has fallen out of the Global Financial Crisis, for example, whose devastation we largely escaped. But it’s just as wrong to assume we’ll necessarily walk a different path. Especially now, where we seem to be living life in their slipstream: the establishment crumbling, insurgents energised, economic pain apparently chronic. The parallels are imperfect, but obvious: Trump, Nigel Farage, Hanson; Keir Starmer, Anthony Albanese, establishment Democrats. If you were writing a political drama set in one country, it would be easy to convert it to another.
The common thread is that norms are being remade, and orthodoxies are open to challenge. The common tone is one of anger, agitation, perhaps even hyperpoliticisation. And that is the perfect environment to foment a common experience of political violence becoming increasingly acceptable over time, then increasingly enacted. Right now, it shows up here in dry numbers we mostly ignore. Next, if the story unfolds as elsewhere, comes the escalation. And if one day that turns to tragedy, on no account will we be able to say we couldn’t see it coming.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Alyis a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
