“Not enough politicians are afraid for their lives right now & I think that’s a problem.”
The comment had been made into a meme, with the words in fancy font printed on an image of a man pointing a gun.
Marija Ercegovac
It was posted on the official page of Nichole Overall, a NSW Nationals MP, by an account with a full name and a shadowy profile pic of a man’s back.
“I’ve never had anything of this nature, this was quite shocking. I was taken aback,” says Overall of the post, which appeared on Monday, in the hours before the alleged attack on federal independent MP Helen Haines.
“It’s just not the way, in a civilised society, we should be addressing things,” Overall says, becoming agitated. “It’s too much.”
Such social media vitriol is a strange amalgam of public and personalised.
It is posted for all to see, but it is deeply silo-ed, which is to say that I don’t know what’s happening in your feed, and you don’t know what’s happening in mine.
You will only see the post on Overall’s Facebook page if it pops up in the online bubble that is perfectly tailored to you, courtesy of a tech company’s algorithm, breeding an isolation that is anything but pro-social.
We live in an age of bombardment, with overwhelming amounts of content coming at us all the time – more content than we could ever need or enjoy.
But at the same time we are increasingly ignorant of the worlds, lives and viewpoints of those who don’t appear in our over-full feeds.
This confusion of content has metastasised threats to public safety, which are now splintered along strange fault lines that don’t necessarily follow traditional ideological positions of left/right.
As Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said earlier in October of the terrorist threat: “We are getting some weird mixed ideologies, logically inconsistent, all cohering on violence.”
But extremists who deal in hostility do tend to share some common denominators – antisemitism being one, and misogyny being the other.
These two ancient hatreds are useful bellwethers for talk that might turn violent.
It is too early to know if Haines’ gender was a factor in the attack on her.
But we are alive to the possibility because we know women politicians cop a degree of sexualised, highly personal abuse unique to their sex.
In March 2025, then-AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw flagged that the nature of threats made towards women MPs was of particular concern, following the arrest of six men for harassing public officials within a few months.
“High office holders are being targeted because they have a public profile, because of the comments they have made in the media, or their positions on policy,” Kershaw said.
“However, in some cases it appears male offenders are targeting women because they are women, or women with an ethnic background.”
Examples include a neo-Nazi leader who was arrested for calling on supporters to “rhetorically rape” independent MP Allegra Spender, a man sentenced for sending death threats to MP Fatima Payman (he told her he had a bullet with her name on it), and another charged with allegedly harassing independent senator Lidia Thorpe.
When asked if she thinks women politicians are singled out for particular abuse, Overall says: “I don’t want to make it a gender thing, but yes, it is most certainly the situation.”
“Within the last 12 to 18 months there has absolutely been a heightened level of viciousness and sadly, it is misogyny.”
She mentions a recent instance where she was called a “ho”.
“It’s things that just simply aren’t said to men.”
The political week took a horror turn with Monday’s attack on Haines.
But even before then, the political discourse had already entered a new era of coarseness.
Independent senator Jacqui Lambie has spoken before about her suffering from vaginal prolapse, in a laudable effort to de-stigmatise the condition from which hundreds of thousands of Australian women silently suffer.
The latest of the cretinous Please Explain videos put out on Pauline Hanson’s YouTube feed over the weekend features Lambie in cartoon form, and witlessly mocks her condition.
One should avoid hyperbole when discussing extremes in political debate, but the cartoon truly represents a new and imbecilic threshold passed.
Hanson told Lambie to “get over it”.
“Have a bit of a laugh, Jacqui, and lighten up.”
It is the same line Hanson issued to Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie, a veteran who has been labelled a “traitor” on these nasty video shorts.
Later on Tuesday, Hanson apologised for any offence caused and said she had asked for the video to be modified.
As Infrastructure Minister Catherine King said on Tuesday, the videos are “not satirical”.
“They’re not funny when you attack someone personally, and they incite people. When you’ve got other MPs, to be honest, posting things about other MPs, it doesn’t help.”
No line can be drawn from the contemptible vulgarity of the videos to the violence of Monday in Wangaratta.
But the two things exist in the same sphere of pernicious influence.
Anyone who pretends otherwise, or tells others, butter-wouldn’t-melt-style, that hateful rhetoric is “just a joke”, should be called out.
To re-purpose former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s saying about disrespect and violence towards women – not all hate speech ends in violence, but all political violence starts with hatred.
More from our Helen Haines coverage
- Suspect named: Police had attended the property of the man arrested
- Hero barber: Ricky thought it was a car accident. Then he saw the knife
- Allegra Spender: If we’re going to make the country safer, it starts in parliament
- Analysis: Attack on Haines must be a turning point for Australia
- What we know so far: The attack on Helen Haines
- Deepfakes and death threats: Inside the epidemic of abuse against female MPs
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