https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9371596/mark-kenny-helen-haines-attack-reveals-the-toxic-cost-of-public-abuse/
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The terrible news of an attack on the federal MP, Dr Helen Haines, has saddened a nation.
Tragically though, it will have come as less of a surprise to anyone prominent in public debate, such is the free-wheeling descent from civility in our digitised public square.
Rank personal abuse on social media, most of it heroically anonymous, is the agar from which the super-charged scourge of misogyny, racism, and a proto-violent culture have grown.
That it would be the gold-hearted Haines attacked - a woman of unimpeachable service, intelligence and shining moral clarity, is devastating.
Powerful public women are clearly a problem for some men. We cannot deny this.
In recent years, the two British MPs murdered were both women, Labour's Jo Cox and the ex-Tory- turned Reform UK member, Ann Widdecombe.
These brutal murders - femicides, assassinations - are the very definition of peak male cowardice. They show that even as women have overcome barriers to achieve public office and approach equal recognition in our parliaments, they are overrepresented in one shameful index: as the subject of vitriolic and violent attacks.
Weak men who cannot control themselves.
I confess to writing these words through an intense sadness. Tears over Haines for whom my admiration, like so many, is unrivalled.
And tears for a moderate, civilised political culture admired the world-over for its robust but proportional articulation of competing interests.
Implicit in Anthony Albanese's call to turn down the temperature, is a recognition that combative, rhetorically abusive discourse is both central to the problem, and to its solution.
Politics thrives on disagreement. A lot of it is performative, theatrical, unnecessarily strident.
We must acknowledge, however, that heated argument - whatever its utility on Capital Hill - travels more broadly.
Branding the government "crook" or "the most rotten ever" and the PM as "totally incompetent" and the "worst in our history" is dangerous, disreputable nonsense. Yet such statements are made daily by our elected representatives.
Ditto for depicting the treasurer as a communist.
Such rhetoric, it turns out, is not harmless. It exists on a spectrum, which means that for some in the community, it registers more literally becoming a kind of runway, a licence for further escalation.
As Lucy Turnbull famously observed "not all disrespect of women ends in violence, but all violence against women begins with disrespect".
And this is true more widely. Politicians and their more vitriolic tabloid-inclined media backers must confront their responsibilities.
They may plead the harmlessness of mere words, but there are, sadly, too many in the community who see no such distinction, feel no such reluctance to act out their rage, their frustrations.
Whatever the motivations of this brutal assault, wise commentators will rightly declare that it is a wake-up call. That it should mark a turning point away from the normalised intolerance commodified on social media and given respectability in our parliaments.
More power to these positive aspirations.
Yet few offer material solutions and fewer still will brook any regulation, at all, of social media companies notwithstanding that mainstream media have been regulated for years.
Consider the risible argument, advanced for selfish political gain, over the proposed digital duty of care. Opponents invoke free speech as an unalloyed good even as its harms accumulate.
Rather, free expression is a freedom that - before the internet - had always occurred within agreed civic constraints.
Why should the internet be different?
That words can be harmful is, ironically, a violent truth that dare not speak its name.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.
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#auspol #violence #misogyny #RWNJs #HelenHaines
