Australia grapples with rising political violence after MP struck by car

Helen Haines was struck by a car outside her office in Wangaratta on a Monday afternoon. The independent MP was hit hard enough to be severely injured. A 43-year-old man was arrested at the scene, and police seized a knife from him. What might have looked like a traffic accident took on a different shape when witnesses described what they saw: the suspect executing a U-turn before driving into Haines, then reversing to hit her again. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, briefed by federal police whose counter-terror squad had joined the investigation, did not hesitate to call it what it appeared to be. "This wasn't an accident," he told the national broadcaster. "There was a deliberate act, it would appear."

Australia has long carried a particular story about itself—a country where political violence is something that happens elsewhere, to other democracies. The attempted assassination of Labor leader Arthur Calwell in 1966 sits in the national memory as an aberration, a distant thing. For decades, that narrative held. But the ground has been shifting, and those who pay attention have been watching it shift. Experts on violent extremism, the head of Australia's domestic spy agency, federal police commissioners—all have been sounding alarms about a gathering storm. The warnings were not abstract. They were grounded in numbers and incidents that had accumulated quietly over years.

In the twelve months leading to June, there were 1,067 reports of harassing and threatening behaviour directed at high office holders. That was an increase from the year before. The incidents were not uniform in their severity, but they were consistent in their message: politicians were targets. Some had received bullets in the mail. Female MPs, and sometimes their children, had been threatened with sexual violence. A Jewish MP's office was firebombed. A Sydney mayor's car was torched. Workplaces were vandalized with regularity. Just days before Haines was struck, Small Business Minister Anne Aly had received a wave of death threats after an opposition politician said she should be "shamed and stoned in the square" over a tax policy. Earlier in the year, Prime Minister Albanese himself had been evacuated from his official residence over a bomb threat. As of August, about twenty cases involving violent threats against him were moving through courts across the country.

Josh Roose, a Deakin University professor who studies violent extremism, told the BBC that Australians had been in denial about what was happening. "We tend to bury our head in the sand and say, 'Not here', but this has been happening now for well over a decade," he said. The drivers were multiple and reinforcing: socioeconomic strain, rising mental health problems, political figures and others who profited—financially or in terms of power—from stoking discontent, and an online environment he described as "carcinogenic." The pace had accelerated sharply since the pandemic. But Roose was clear that politicians themselves bore responsibility. The old boundaries had been crossed. Individuals and their families were now fair game in ways they had not been before. This was happening across the political spectrum.

Mike Burgess, head of Australia's domestic spy agency Asio, had warned for years that political violence was looming. In his 2026 threat assessment, he offered an analogy: "Just as climate change increases the likelihood of extreme weather but does not forecast specific storms, politically motivated violence, including acts of terrorism, is more likely even though we cannot predict a specific attack." Federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett added another dimension. It was not always ideology driving people toward violence. Grievance was doing it too. People felt isolated, disconnected, searching for something to attach meaning to. They found it online, in communities built around anger.

In the days after Haines was hit, MPs began describing how they now moved through the world. Some wore disguises in public. Offices were locked. Crowds were scanned for threats. Georgie Purcell, a Victorian state MP who shares part of her electorate with Haines, spoke about what it meant to be a woman in politics now. "Being a woman in politics changes the way you move through the world. We consider where we park our cars, the route we drive home, if we hold public events," she said. "For many of us, the news... is our worst nightmare." Coalition Senator James Paterson told reporters he was not surprised. There was frustration in Canberra that security arrangements had not evolved to match the climate.

What was at stake went beyond the immediate safety of individual politicians. Australia's political culture had long rested on a particular kind of accessibility. It was not unusual to encounter your local member at the shops, or to chat with them at a football match. Many kept their office doors open to constituents who wanted to raise concerns or share ideas. Haines was particularly known for this kind of engagement. On Monday night, Albanese spoke about what he did not want to see. "I don't want to see a political system in which you can't have conversations with people at the supermarket, in the street, at street meetings, public forums – that's an important part of our democracy." But the question hanging over the country now was whether that kind of democracy was still possible, or whether the volcano of threats that experts had been warning about had finally begun to erupt.