What We Said Over Breakfast: Helen Haines and Division

A Table in Australia

I had breakfast this morning with a group of friends who, in terms of cultural background, are a reasonably fair representation of contemporary Australian society. There were six of us, three men and three women, and every one of them apart from me works in the medical profession, which makes it, on that measure at least, a thoroughly intelligent table. Among the men there was a Muslim, a man as Anglo-Australian as they come, and me, an Indigenous man. Two of the women were also very Anglo-Australian, and the third was my wife, who is Australian–New York Jewish.

I mention the composition of the table not for decoration but because of what happened next. The conversation turned to what happened to Helen Haines yesterday. The Independent member for Indi was struck by a car outside her electorate office in Wangaratta, in what the Prime Minister has described as a deliberate act. She remains in a critical condition in hospital, counter-terrorism authorities are involved, and a man is in custody. It was the Muslim man at our table who raised it first, and from there the discussion moved, without anyone steering it, towards a conclusion on which the whole group agreed: that Australia has a serious problem with violence against women, and that a meaningful part of the current dynamic is being driven by Pauline Hanson for short-term political gain.

I want to set that conversation down carefully, because a consensus reached over eggs and coffee is not an argument, and because the subject is too serious for the loose talk that a shocking event tends to invite. What follows is my attempt to say what the table agreed, what I think the evidence does and does not support, and why the question reaches well beyond one politician and one terrible morning, into the media that amplify her and the police services whose conduct tells Australians what is tolerated.

What We Know, and What We Do Not

Begin with the limits of the facts. At the time of writing the motive for the attack on Helen Haines has not been established. The Prime Minister has said it appears to have been deliberate, the Australian Federal Police, ASIO and Victoria Police are working together through a joint counter-terrorism team, and a suspect has been arrested, but a suspect in custody is not a convicted person, and nothing publicly confirmed tells us what he believed or why he acted. It would be unfair to him, and corrosive of the very standards I am defending, to announce a cause before the investigation or the courts have found one. Haines is a 65-year-old former nurse and midwife who has spent her public life on rural health, integrity in government and the unglamorous business of representing a regional electorate. Whatever the explanation, an attack on a member of parliament at her own office is an attack on the ordinary mechanics of democracy, and it has rightly drawn condemnation across the political spectrum.

So I want to be exact about what I am and am not claiming. I am not claiming that Pauline Hanson caused what happened in Wangaratta, or that anyone who listens to her is capable of such an act. I am claiming something more modest and, I think, more defensible: that the table’s judgment about violence against women, and about the climate in which it occurs, rests on a body of research about how prejudice and contempt operate in societies, and that this research points to the conduct of public figures as one factor among several. The friends at my table did not say it was the whole story, and neither do I. Violence against women has deep and independent roots, in family violence, in ideas of male entitlement, in economic dependence and in institutional failure to take complaints seriously. The politics of hate and division that Hanson continues to push is one of those roots, and ignoring it does not help.

How Hatred Finds Its Permission

In a recent post, “Words That Arm: Why Pauline Hanson’s Racism Matters”, I drew on a strand of social psychology that I find more illuminating than most of the commentary that follows events like this one. Researchers who study prejudice have long distinguished between what people privately believe and what they are willing to say aloud. Christian Crandall and Amy Eshleman’s justification-suppression model, one of the more durable frameworks in that literature, describes prejudice as something most people hold in a kind of permanent tension. On one side is an underlying attitude. On the other is a set of social norms that suppress its outward expression, because expressing it carries a reputational cost.

The central insight of the model is that this suppression is not stable. People are constantly searching, consciously or not, for justifications that would let them express what they already feel without paying that cost, and public figures who model contemptuous speech toward a group function, for the people already primed to think that way, as exactly such a justification. The effect is not to create prejudice from nothing. It is to lower the price of voicing it, and to tell people who had been holding their tongues that they no longer need to.

It is worth putting the strongest opposing case, because there is one. Defenders of Hanson, and of robust political speech generally, will say that she voices what many voters already think and that to treat this as dangerous is to treat voters as dupes; that free speech includes the right to offend; that people who commit violence are driven mostly by personal pathology, grievance and online radicalisation rather than by the rhetoric of a politician; and that the research linking speech to behaviour is more contested than its enthusiasts allow. Each of these points has force. The justification-suppression model is a model of expression, not proof that particular speeches produce particular acts, and the leap from attitude to violence is long and mediated by many things. I accept all of that.

But the argument I am making does not require that speech be the sole cause, or even a sufficient one. It requires only that social norms shape what people are willing to say and do, that those with platforms help shape those norms, and that when a prominent person spends years treating groups of fellow Australians as a problem to be managed, she raises the probability, at the margin, that someone already inclined that way will conclude he has been given leave. A small shift in probability across a population of some twenty-seven million is not a small thing. I would add that a culture of contempt for one group tends to loosen the restraints around contempt for others, including women. That is an inference rather than a finding, and I offer it as one, but it is the inference my friends and I found most plausible.

The Amplifiers

Hanson is not the only part of the problem, and it would be too convenient to make her the whole of it. A politician’s words travel only as far as the channels that carry them, and Australia’s mainstream media bear, in my view, a great deal of responsibility for how far those words travel. My own instinct is to say that much of it is rabid and says very nearly whatever it likes. Put more precisely, commercial incentives reward outrage, attention generates revenue, corrections are slow and small, and the people who pay the price for a distorted story are rarely the people who published it.

There is a serious defence of the press that I want to acknowledge. A free press is a precondition of the accountability I care about, much of the reporting that exposes wrongdoing in Australian institutions comes from the same organisations I am criticising, and the alternative to a noisy, adversarial media is not a gentler one but a captured one. I am not arguing for restraint imposed from outside. I am arguing that editors know the difference between reporting a politician’s remarks and platforming them as an end in itself, between asking hard questions and manufacturing the week’s fear of a chosen minority, and that this choice is made daily and could be made differently. According to reporting on his press conference, the Prime Minister himself pointed to the changing face of social media as having raised the temperature around politics. That is a notable thing for a head of government to say, because it concedes that the information environment is now part of the security problem.

None of this excuses anyone who commits violence. A person who drives a car at another human being is responsible for that act. But responsibility has layers, and we are entitled to ask, and as a society obliged to ask, what kind of environment we are building around the individuals who act.

The Institution That Is Meant to Protect

I would go further, and this is where the argument turns from politicians and the media towards something closer to my own working life. If public figures and the press tell Australians what may be said, the police tell Australians what may be done. No institution speaks more directly to the question of what a society will tolerate, because the police are the part of the state that people meet at their most vulnerable. I would argue that tacitly accepting racism within Australia’s police forces reinforces the message that racism is acceptable, since tolerance of prejudice by an institution charged with equal treatment is a far louder signal than anything a politician can say.

I grew up in the company of a number of Holocaust survivors. One thing that recurred in what they told me, and that my uncle, who is also a survivor and lives in Paris, has reinforced over the years, concerned what happened when a Jewish person complained of being attacked or robbed by non-Jewish people. Again and again, as they described it, the police arrived, criminalised the victim and took the side of the aggressor. I do not offer this as statistics, and I am not suggesting that every police officer in every place and time behaved this way. I offer it as testimony from people who had every reason to know what it is to be abandoned by those whose duty was to protect them, and as a pattern recognisable, in structure if not in scale, to anyone who has spent time around complaints against police.

The same pattern, I contend, appears in the conduct of ACT Policing, which is an arm of the Australian Federal Police. When the target of Mr Angel Marina’s racism complained to ACT Policing, the AFP  targeted the complainant and closed ranks to protect the person complained about. During discussions I had with Ms Maureen Colley of the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office about these issues, she advised me, I’m paraphrasing, “that the AFP will not investigate any complaints of racism or assault against Angel Marina, because they have decided that the Indigenous man is the guilty party, and they will do nothing that will jeopardise their case against the Indigenous man. Any investigation into Angel Marina, that brought his integrity or motivations into question, would weaken their case”, Ms Colley went on: “Sergeant Melissa Ward [of the AFP] advised me that there would be no investigations into any allegations raised against Mr Angel Marina, because it’s not in the AFP‘s interests to conduct such an investigation, and Mr Marina has a lot of friends in the AFP, and they have directed that there will be no investigation into Mr. Marina.” (I draw this discussion from contemporaneous notes I made during, or immediately after, the discussions I had with Ms Colley).

I have consistently described Mr Marina as a white supremacist, and I stand by that description. I further maintain that those AFP officers who refused to investigate any complaints made against him, by a non-Indigenous person, would strongly indicate that those AFP officers hold similar white supremacist views. I set out much of the basis for it in my Words That Arm series, and readers are free to weigh that material and reach their own view. What I want to emphasise here is the structural point rather than the individual one: whatever one concludes about Mr Marina, the way an institution responds to a complaint of racism is itself evidence of what that institution regards as acceptable.

I recognise the objection that individual cases are not institutional culture, and that police services contain many officers of integrity who would be appalled by the pattern I describe. That is true and I do not dispute it. But institutional culture is not measured by its best officer. It is measured by what happens to the person who complains, and by whether the answer to a complaint of racism is investigation or hostility. An organisation that reliably protects its own at the expense of complainants teaches every observer, inside and outside the force, what the rules really are.

What an Overhaul Would Ask of Us

My view is that Australian society needs a complete overhaul of how it handles these questions, and that it must begin where permission is granted. Politicians come first, because they set the tone of public life and often have the most to gain from division. The media follow immediately, because they decide which voices reach the public and in what frame. After them come the attitudes entrenched in Australia’s police forces, where reform has been slowest because accountability has been weakest. Underneath all of these sits education: how we teach our children what equality means, and what a society may reasonably demand from those it arms and empowers.

What should we demand of police services? In theory at least, they exist to treat everyone equally and not to make decisions on the basis of race or mateship. The second of those words matters as much as the first. Racism in policing is often not the product of ideology but of loyalty, the instinct to protect colleagues, to treat the complainant as a threat to the group, to close ranks. Mateship is a virtue on a building site and a vice in an investigations unit. An equal-treatment duty means little unless complaints about racism, including complaints that implicate police themselves, are examined by someone with no stake in the outcome, and unless the results are visible enough that the public can see whether the promise is being kept.

For politicians the demand is simpler and harder: stop treating contempt for groups as a campaign resource. For the media, decline to launder it. For schools, teach children how prejudice works, including the psychology Crandall and Eshleman describe, because a child who understands how a justification for contempt gets built is better equipped to notice when one is being offered. None of this is utopian. Each of these is a decision that someone makes every week.

A sceptic will say that “complete overhaul” is the language of people who have given up on reform by increments. I would answer that increments have been tried and the pattern persists. But I accept the point in one respect. Grand claims invite grand disappointments, and the work that matters is dull: complaint mechanisms, training, transparency, and the willingness of senior people to say in public that something went wrong.

Back to the Table

I keep returning to the table. Six people of different backgrounds, faiths and politics, most of them professionally trained to withhold judgment until the evidence is in, arrived at the same view within minutes of raising the subject: that a politics of hatred and division is not harmless, and that the damage it does is not confined to its immediate targets. It is not a scientific sample and I do not pretend otherwise. But it seemed to me worth noting that it was the Muslim man, a member of a community that has often been a target of the kind of rhetoric we were discussing, who raised the subject first, and that nobody else at the table needed persuading.

The conversation also reminded me that resisting hatred is not work that belongs to the people it targets. It belongs to everyone who has a table, a vote, a platform, a uniform or a classroom. The Anglo-Australians at breakfast were not defending anyone but themselves, in the sense that a society in which contempt is cheap is poorer and more dangerous for all its members.

As I write, Helen Haines has lost a leg, is fighting for her life, and I hope, with the rest of the country, that she recovers. Whatever the investigation finds about the man responsible, the rest of us have a question to answer that does not depend on his motive: what kind of country are we building, and who gets to say what is permitted in it? The answer begins with politicians who accept that words arm, a media that accepts that amplification is a choice, and police who accept that an equal-treatment duty means protecting the person who complained, not the person complained about. We will not fix all of it at a breakfast table. But it is a place to begin.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, October 2026

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