Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)
The attack on Independent MP Helen Haines in Wangaratta has shocked a nation whose politics is normally peaceful even by the standards of mature democracies. A hardworking, decent parliamentarian with a strong moral compass and a gift for achieving consensus, Haines seems an especially unlikely figure to attract the kind of brutality visited on her yesterday.
We do not yet know the motivation behind this alleged attack. But there is no question Australia’s politics have been fractious over the past 12 months. Violence, literal and rhetorical, has been a growing feature of the landscape, shaping the relations between citizens and politicians – and among one another. The Bondi massacre of December 14 2025 is widely regarded as a tragic turning point in this regard.
But like other features of our public landscape, both good and bad, political violence has a history in Australia – one from which we may learn.
Australian assassinations
Australian leaders have mostly avoided the assassinations more common in other places. Even Australia’s parent culture, Great Britain, lost a prime minister to an assassination in 1812 when John Bellingham shot Spencer Perceval through the heart in the lobby of the House of Commons.
The 20th century alone saw two sitting American presidents murdered, along with leading activists and major aspirants to higher office. Two Indian prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi, were slain in the century’s later decades, as well as an Israeli statesman in Yitzhak Rabin.
No Australian prime ministers or premiers have been assassinated to date. The deaths of figures such as Joseph Lyons, John Curtin and Ben Chifley were the result of natural causes. The circumstances of Liberal prime minister Harold Holt’s death are well known but, notwithstanding conspiracy theories, did not involve foul play.
Still, assassination attempts have occasionally blighted Australia’s political landscape. The first came in 1868 with the visit of Prince Alfred, second in line to Queen Victoria’s throne. The prince was shot at a welcome event near Sydney by an Irish republican with evidence of mental illness.
The assailant was executed, but the prince lived, saved by the bullet hitting a metal clip of his trouser braces. The attempt set off a new wave of sectarian animosity between protestants and Catholics, ably stoked by Federation father Henry Parkes. (There was much less fuss after the apparent attempt on the life of then-Prince Charles in Sydney in 1994, though in that case the bullets were blanks.)
In the 1960s, it was war and peace that stirred political passions. Labor leader Arthur Calwell was an opponent of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and it was after a “rowdy meeting” about conscription in Sydney in 1966 that he was shot in the jaw by Peter Kocan, who had a leaning to far-right politics and was evidently ill.
Calwell forgave Kocan, who became a writer of some renown.
Crime and corruption were also potential motivators of assassination. In July 1977, anti-drug campaiagner and Liberal candidate from Griffith in the Riverina, Donald Mackay, went missing. His vehicle was found stained with blood, but his body was never recovered. His presumed death precipitated a state royal commission into drug trafficking.
In 1994, John Newman – Labor’s NSW state MP for Cabramatta and a committed opponent of criminal gangs – was murdered in his driveway. Fairfield councillor Phuong Ngo, a local notoriety with a party power base and criminal links, was later convicted, though with many questions left unanswered.
Political violence
While assassinations have been rare, political violence has at times made its mark on Australia. The spearing of Governor Arthur Phillip in the right shoulder in September 1790 was an early instance, though as Kate Fullagar explains, this incident was likely a payback ritual orchestrated by Yiyura man Bennelong in the hope of enabling detente rather than committing murder.
In the early nineteenth century, political violence centred on frontier conflict and warfare between settlers and Indigenous communities. The University of Newcastle’s massacre map remains a telling window into that world.
Democracy itself was, at times, a violent thing. The gold miners’ rebellion at Eureka in 1854 – triggered by unhappiness with license fees and colonial administration generally – left more than two dozen dead, most of them miners or civilians. Miners also violently attacked Chinese diggers at Buckland River in Victoria (1857), with some fatalities, and Lambing Flat in New South Wales (1861).
The prospect of similar violence hung in the air during the industrial strikes of the 1890s. Colonial troops in Melbourne were ordered to “fire low” on union agitators and “lay them out”. In western Queensland, soldiers intimidated striking shearers with Nordenfeldt machine guns.
Historian Sean Scalmer has shown that early colonial elections were marred by violence and even occasional killings on the hustings. Australia’s unique history of electoral innovation, including the secret ballot and broad suffrage, was partly an attempt to “contain contention”, as he puts it.
There was growing violence in Australian politics – and society – from the 1960s. Anti-war protests occasionally erupted into conflict. On a few occasions, so did the demonstrations against Sir John Kerr, who had dismissed the Whitlam government in November 1975. These involved various projectiles including, in one instance, a brick to smash open a window of the vice-regal car.
Party struggles also contained an underbelly of factional violence. In 1980, left-wing Labor activist Peter Baldwin was bashed in Sydney, the instigators presumed to be right-wing opponents. It was an extreme case, but factional battles in Liberal Party branches in Sydney have occasionally descended into fisticuffs in the more recent past, too.
The 1980s and 1990s saw several massacres in suburbs such as Sydney’s Milperra (1984) and Melbourne’s Clifton Hill (1987). Some, including Milperra, were precipitated by gang wars, but the ready availability of guns was of broader concern to many, including senior Liberal John Howard.
He was prime minister by the time he went to the regional Victorian town of Sale, where he was explaining his controversial gun law reforms and firearm buyback program. The measures were a response to the devastating Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. Howard famously wore a bullet-proof vest to the lectern, an instruction from his security personnel but an apparent insult to his audience.
Terror on southern shores
The late 20th century was also an era of growing terrorism in Australia. Croatian extremists and Yugoslav agents were seemingly at war with one another in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney.
In the latter city, a deadly attack on a gathering of world leaders at a regional Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting occurred in 1978. The likely suspects, an Indian religious sect-turned-cult, appear to have targeted the Indian prime minister, who was meeting with Malcolm Fraser and other leaders at the Hilton Hotel. Multiple innocent bystanders, including two unlucky garbagemen who accidentally picked up a bomb left in a bin, were killed.
There was also suspected terrorism at play when, in December 1980, an assassin’s bullets killed the Turkish Consul-General Şarık Arıyak and his bodyguard outside the former’s Sydney residence. Armenian activists claimed responsibility for the murder, but evidence was lacking. Today, the NSW Police reward for information stands at $1 million.
Prime ministers and other senior politicians have sometimes been rumoured to be the targets of terrorists. Yet there was always risk of hoaxes. A supposed plan by a Sri Lankan PhD student to assassinate Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop, and target major Sydney landmarks, was revealed to be fabricated. The conspirator, a colleague of the accused, was later jailed over forged evidence.
Threats to democracy
Political officeholders are increasingly at risk of political violence around the world, and not only in autocratic settings where physical coercion is a regular political tool. In the past decade, British parliamentarians Jo Cox and Sir David Amess were killed in office, and more recently the former MP Ann Widdecombe was brutally murdered in her own home.
In 2022, the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in Nara by a man with religious grievances shocked the world. So had the storming of the US Capitol a year earlier. In that case, a violent mob threatened to assassinate congressional leaders along with the sitting vice president, Mike Pence.
Such scenes at the heart of the United States, which historically thought itself a democratic beacon for the world, were astonishing. People forgot it was also the product of a revolutionary political culture.
There are some common causes for concern. The internet and social media have made it easier for angry or unwell people to threaten politicians’ safety. On Monday night, Australia’s home affairs minister Tony Burke said there were 1,067 reports of “harassing and threatening behaviour against various high office holders” in the last financial year alone.
Turning the temperature down
While we still don’t know if the attack on Helen Haines was politically motivated, condemnation of the attack has united politicians of different stripes. Haines is a much admired figure across the parliament. Responding to the attack, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for the political “temperature to be turned down”.
Democracy is a practice as much as a system. It requires for its survival a steady nurturing by those – citizens as well as representatives – who perform it. Helen Haines herself has been in the forefront of efforts to restore trust in a political system that has generated disaffection among many Australians in recent years. She has been repaid with a violence that is the polar opposite of all that she stands for.
Australia’s world-leading history of electoral innovation was partly an effort to mitigate against violence. But the innovations of an earlier generation may not be enough to defend democracy from today’s threats, not least those arising from a social media ecosystem that draws its oxygen from base emotions.
Resting on the laurels of compulsory and preferential voting is not an option. Sober reflection from political participants – in practice, everybody – is what our present circumstances demand.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.