Australian politics has long carried an unpretentious ethos with elected representatives who pride themselves on being casual and accessible.

The shocking allegedly deliberate attack on independent MP Helen Haines, who was rammed and pinned outside her electoral office, has however forced a reckoning across the nation of this ideal.

Our elected representatives have long leaned into a culture of everyday accessibility — where the pomp and separation that leaders abroad embody is quashed Down Under by Australia’s ruthlessly enforced “pub test” and “tall poppy syndrome” social levelling.

Iconic political moments often spring from Australia’s larrikin tradition — from Bob Hawke’s beer sculls and his America’s Cup declaration that bosses shouldn’t be “bums”, to Tony Abbott’s bizarre onion bite, Bob Katter’s crocodile ramblings, and even Paul Keating’s “scumbags” insults in Parliament.

The unique approachability of Australian politicians has long been celebrated internationally.

Whether it be John Howard’s decision to directly address an angry mob of gun enthusiasts post-Port Arthur firearm reforms or Gough Whitlam’s personal reply to a then-schoolboy Kevin Rudd, which sparked his political and academic path.

But the glow of innocence that has long surrounded Australian politics has begun to fade in the wake of the shocking attack on Haines just metres from terrified staff in her Victorian electoral office on October 19.

The 65-year-old has since been described as non-controversial, genuinely decent, someone who epitomises compassion and “the best among us” by her elected colleagues.

Past and present politicians from across parties, the country and globe have voiced their horror at the allegedly targeted attack.

The vibrant hum of a typical sitting day was drained from the corridors of power as parliamentarians, their staff and lobbyists returned to Canberra a week on.

While the motive is investigated and questions linger over whether it was driven by political extremism, it has shaken the ground under Parliament House.

The hostile treatment of public figures and the tone of political discourse has been thrown into the spotlight as people search for answers.

Anthony Albanese has repeatedly called for the parliament to turn “the temperature down” and set an example to Australians.

The Prime Minister says the threat landscape “had changed” since he first entered politics.

But it’s on the floor of the chamber where the most vitriolic and often shockingly violent remarks have their genesis.

“Smash her” Albanese himself once yelled to his colleague at the dispatch box during debate.

More recently, Liberal frontbencher Angie Bell yelled that WA MP Anne Aly and the PM “should be absolutely shamed and stoned in the square” before later withdrawing it.

What Bell didn’t know was that Aly had received 19 death threats that week alone.

For her entire public life as a prominent violent extremism academic turned Labor frontbencher she has brushed off her family’s anxious questions about her safety.

But the threats have been horrendous, both online and in person.

Her expertise often comes in handy for talking down irate people who visit her office.

“We had somebody come into our office with a knife. I just went into mode, I told my staff to leave through the back door. My staff are my primary concern,” Aly says.

“I had another fellow come in. He was yelling and screaming. He was being quite racist. I just listened to him and I empathised with him. When we walked out of the office he was in tears and he gave me a hug and said ‘thank you’.

“Oftentimes, people just need a human connection.”

She’s one of many who carry duress alarms and who have installed AI-powered systems online to shield them from the worst of the abuse.

The vile material online can include direct death and rape threats, sexualised deepfakes, racial slurs, bigotry, among others.

And overwhelming women are bearing the brunt of the worst abuse.

Some have asked if how much one can endure is really the price of entry to politics in Australia?

In person, Liberal frontbencher Melissa McIntosh has had people threatened to blow her up.

Online, she’s been a victim of coordinated “pile on” harassment.

She, like many MPs, who want to use social media to reach their communities, are facing increasingly hostile environments.

“The more your profile increases as a politician — the greater the abuse that comes with it. And it’s something much more sinister than just disagreement. It’s dark,” McIntosh says.

In a first-of-its-kind case late last year, Gold Coast man Anthony Rotondo was fined $340,000 for deepfake pornography of prominent Australian women to a now-defunct website.

But often when they do report abuse, nothing happens.

It took a media enquiry for a death threat levelled at WA Labor’s Katrina Stratton which referenced a “bullet” to the head for Meta to take action in July.

Physical threat to women in politics has also remained a concern, particularly amid a string of high-profile incidents in the past fortnight.

It includes security incidents at the offices of Communications Minister Anika Wells, her Shadow Minister Sarah Henderson, and WA State MP and Labor Minister Hannah Beazley.

Beazley’s staff had raised the alarm after a man armed with homemade nunchucks entered her Victoria Park electorate office asking for her.

Wells hasn’t been a stranger to ugly threats, with a man arrested in December 2025 for promising to kill not only her but to murder her three children, who are under the age of 10.

Many women have long felt scared to draw too much focus to their plights.

Some because they acknowledge other women in the community face violence daily without the security support they receive from AFP.

Others because biting back just fuels the rage.

Greens deputy leader Steph Hodgins-May was inundated with abuse after posting that she’d called a keyboard warrior to confront them over a “you stupid b....” comment on one of her videos.

Online as the notification came through, she clicked through his profile to find he owned a law firm in New South Wales.

“He answered the phone and I said, ‘Do you think it’s appropriate to use violent, aggressive language towards women?’ she recalls.

“He said, ‘oh, I don’t think that’s violent’. He was so calm, cool and collected, and just felt this entitlement to speak to a woman like that. I found that quite disturbing.”

However, journalist calls and messages to his office went unanswered.

While relatively new to politics, the threats to Senator Hodgins-May have been confronting and frequent.

“I’ve had death threats. AFP followed one up, which was a guy who lived in Queensland,” she says.

“I do regret not taking that further because — just because I had distance between me and him, what’s to say that he’s not contacting other women who lives closer?”

While McIntosh says that while the conversation about safety was welcomed, she didn’t want to be held back from engaging with her Western Sydney community.

“I did the walk down the high street the day after the attack on Helen — in a sense of defiance. I don’t know what sort of defiance,” she says.

“I’m very, very accessible to my community. So I think that’s something that I would fight very hard to maintain.”

However, she admittedly finds herself often looking over her shoulder, worried about an attack.

“Helen also got love from her community. There is this great contradiction right now that you could be a popular community MP but still be at great risk. That’s the troubling thing,” she says.

The country’s only female Prime Minister Julia Gillard was the most high profile target for abuse.

Rallies crying “Ditch the Witch” plagued her brief time in the top role. A slogan recycled this year ahead of former Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen’s resignation.

Gillard’s political rival at the time, Tony Abbott, had been photographed in front of the placards.

When the escalating personal attacks spilled out in the House of Representatives it spurred on her famous 2012 misogyny speech.

Radio shock jock Alan Jones also targeted her on the airways, claiming her father “died of shame” over her “lies” in a September 2012 segment.

Another record-breaking woman to cop it was the first female WA Premier Carmen Lawrence, who was likened to “a corpse hanging in the breeze” and told “someone should cut me down”.

Former WA opposition leader Mia Davies, who more recently was a candidate in the Federal seat of Bullwinkel, said on reflection of her time in State parliament as a Nationals member she “tolerated too much”.

She expressed concern for the next generation of women to enter public life.

“What are we asking them to accept? We shouldn’t endorse a system where those who succeed are those most prepared to endure the abuse,” she says.

“Reflecting back, I tolerated too much. In the early days I was reluctant to block people online or call out bad behaviour, worried it would be seen as avoiding criticism.

“We’ve allowed legitimate criticism to become confused with a sense of entitlement to intimidate, threaten and personally abuse.”

She is one of many women from across parliament who have formed a new network to support each other.

More than 50 women have signed up to a new artificial intelligence tool to help shield them from the messages of abuse and threats.

Australian politicians have also reflected on their language.

Several politicians have begun signing up to a civility pledge which was founded in the UK after the attack of British MP Jo Cox, who was shot and fatally stabbed in 2016 outside her West Yorkshire constituency surgery.

Ugly moments of past inflammatory rhetoric have also resurfaced in videos, audio, and written quotes posted online.

It includes Housing Minister Clare O’Neil’s caption “smash some Liberals” on a now deleted Instagram post.

The PM has also been in hot water after it was revealed his office had disturbed a so-called “dirt file” about Haines just weeks before the attack.

Independents Kate Chaney and David Pocock want Question Time cleaned up — expressing their “embarrassment” and “disgust” in the verbal abuse dispatch box. Nationals MP Pat Conaghan called for it to be scrapped entirely.

“In a democracy, we have every right to disagree with one another,” former Labor PM Kevin Rudd says, echoing the palpable shock across Canberra and calling for politicians to return to healthy disagreement.

While opposition leader Angus Taylor said people should be careful not to prompt violence, robust debate was part of Australia’s Westminster system.

Jordan McSwiney, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra, however, suggested there had been some “romanticising” around political discourse in Australia.

“There’s a lot of talk about how we need to improve the quality of parliamentary discourse,” he says.

“All of which I very much agree with. That is something we should aspire to most definitely.

“I do wonder if there’s maybe some romanticising going on because, frankly, I just don’t think that parliamentary discourse was ever particularly good.

“That part of our Westminster system. It is a very, very combative and competitive two-party approach to politics.”

The online mudslinging has also been under the microscope.

There’s also rising concern over “bot farms” or “rage bait content mills” in third world countries.

Pauline Hanson’s controversial “Please Explain” cartoon has copped most of the attention — especially episodes showing independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Mr Albanese being mowed down by vehicles.

The fiery Queensland Senator has rejected calls to take it down.

Andrew Hastie, who has had to dramatically scale up security, had called it out just months ago after labelling the war veteran a “traitor”.

In the days after the attack on Haines, Hastie said Australians need to start reconsidering their online presence.

“The temperature has gone up with social media. The worst side of our character is brought out by social media,” he says.

“How can we each be better? Maybe don’t like that nasty post or don’t send that nasty comment.

“These are the sorts of things that we need to start reconsidering.”

Director of the Curtin Extremism Research Network Ben Rich says while the attention economy online was accelerating views, he argued political violence and anger were linked to broader pressures.

It includes perceived economic deprivation, distrust in institutions, and social fragmentation.

He, like McSwiney, says it was not simply political rhetoric.

Rich says the days of larrikin politicians had long gone and Australia was dramatically different than the 80s with the acceptance of neoliberalism fading in the decades since.

“The professionalisation of politics definitely plays a factor here,” he says.

Rich also says the 24-hour news cycle and social media had accelerated discourse.

“It was significantly slower back then. The frenetic nature of the media environment just means that the sort of viciousness of politics has just intensified significantly,” he says.

“The incentives to be provocative and to dehumanise your opposition has really intensified.”

Australia’s domestic intelligence boss, Director-General of Security Mike Burgess, and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett have increasingly warned of the emerging threats and targeting of public figures.

At Director-General Burgess’ latest annual threat assessment in July he had described how individuals were becoming radicalised faster and increasingly embracing mixed ideologies.

Just moments later he warned his audience: “When inflammatory rhetoric and provocative protest lead to violence, we are shocked — but we should not be surprised”.

While Commissioner Barrett didn’t link Haines’ attack to a political incident while the motive is still under investigation, she said that politicians’ actions can prompt a reaction in the community.

Greens leader David Shoebridge has sought to remind Australians that the allegedly targeted attack on Haines was an act of gendered violence.

Comments sections of female MPs profiles can be littered with anything and everything — gendered violence, misogynistic comments, racism, and homophobic slurs just to name a few.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek has since warned that rape and gang rape threats had become too common.

But it’s not just elected representatives.

Many heads of department in Australia have to frequently change their phones for safety reasons.

Both Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant and Commissioner Barrett have spoken about the vitriol and threats they face.

Commissioner Barrett says the AFP had regularly publicly outlined concerns about the growing threats against high office holders and undertaken measures to assist their safety.

It has included establishing National Security Investigations (NSI) teams in October last year, which she described as a “flying squad of hate disrupters who focus on high-harm, high-impact politically motivated violence, communal violence and hate crimes”.

“Since the NSI teams were established, 41 individuals have been charged for offences relating to threats against federal parliamentarians and high office holders,” she says.

AFP reports of harassment and threatening behaviour towards high office holders had risen from 951 to 1067 in the most recent financial year.

Mr Albanese says there were at least 20 active cases in the courts involving death threats against him.

While political violence is seen as rare in Australia, our history is marked with the 1966 attempted assassination of then-Opposition leader Arthur Calwell and the 1994 murder of NSW MP John Newman.

It has long occurred and more frequently abroad.

In July, former conservative minister and Reform UK spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe was found dead in her Devon home, aged 78.

Both the UK and Australia committed to help protect parliamentarians from online abuse at this week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

In recent years the world has also reacted to assassination of American right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, Japan’s former PM Shinzo Abe, British MP David Amess and an attempted one on Donald Trump.

Yet at home in response to Kirk’s murder, prominent Australian left-wing commentator Hannah Ferguson questioned: “Must we condemn every act of political violence? Should violent views be met with violence?”

“Is violence sometimes necessary? Yes.”

Despite her own endorsement of political violence, Ferguson — who has announced a run for the Prime Minister’s seat of Grayndler — has spoken out against the “unhealthy discourse” targeting female politicians.

Yet, it is the emergence of such prominent aspirants that leaves many in parliament questioning what kind of future awaits the next generation of leaders.

But many want to use what McIntosh described as “momentum and motivation” after Haines’ attack to ensure women’s pathway to politics is safer.

Senator Hodgins-May says given the insecurity of work, impact on family life and strain of the job, it was already difficult to encourage women to run for office.

She says regular threats were just another factor that weighed on candidates’ minds and believed much of the abuse online was to silence women from platforms.

“I meet some extraordinary women and often ask ‘Would you consider being a candidate?’ But it’s hard to encourage women to be involved,” she says.

“They’re potentially entering a really unsafe workplace where they are exposed to daily threats of violence.

“But we have to keep asking the question.

“We have to keep pushing because we know that having women in positions of leadership is ultimately going to ensure that we can address this scourge of gendered violence.”

Dr Aly says women’s contribution in politics was “valuable, useful, and needed” and urged them not to be deterred.

“For the first time the gender pay gap is the lowest that it’s been for many years. All of this happened, not by accident. It’s because women are here. Women are here making a change, having a say, being at the table.

“It actually does make real change. It does actually make lives better.”