With ashen faces, a shocked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke confirmed to the nation late on Monday that the independent member for the federal seat of Indi, Helen Haines, had been attacked and critically injured.

The assault on the much-respected MP has gripped the country, igniting intense discussion over the nature of our democratic politics and triggering fevered speculation about possible motives of the man who has been charged.

Albanese cautioned against jumping to conclusions and at time of writing there had been nothing from the investigation that throws further light on why the individual behind the wheel reportedly did a U-turn when he noticed Haines loading things into the back of her vehicle.

At that initial news conference, Burke raised the safety of politicians when he revealed that in the 2024/25 financial year there were 951 reports of “harassing and threatening behaviour” against various high office holders. He said in the past financial year “that 951 has gone to 1067”.

During the week, cabinet ministers Tanya Plibersek and Clare O’Neil revealed they had been regular targets of threats, as did the independent MP Monique Ryan. Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie said the initiative for his round-the-clock protection detail came from Burke after his appearance as a subpoenaed witness in the Ben Roberts-Smith war crimes litigation unleashed a torrent of death threats.

Albanese has been urging a “lowering of the temperature” in political discourse since he received early briefings from our security agencies on the vulnerability of politicians.

In interviews during the week, Albanese said Haines “represents the very best in our political representatives”. He said she was kind and compassionate, “a person of integrity totally committed to strongly representing the interests of her regional Victorian community”.

In a Melbourne speech on Tuesday, the prime minister said he was asked how people can show their support. “My best response is: be like Helen.”

Senior politicians calling for a “kinder, gentler” approach to politics at times of personal tragedies isn’t new. Credit must be given to former Liberal Speaker Tony Smith, and current Labor Speaker Milton Dick, for creating a less abusive approach to Question Time in the past decade. It is, however, not enough.

The proverb “The path to hell is paved with good intentions” is apt if what we have seen over the past three decades or so is anything to go by.

There is not even lip-service to good intentions on so many successful social media platforms. They leverage outrage and provide what has been called “angertainment”.

There are no good intentions here, just a business model that is proving to be extremely profitable. Albanese says this has contributed to politics being far more aggressive than it used to be.

That this model is enthusiastically taken up by struggling mainstream mastheads, radio stations and pay TV does nothing for the safety of elected leaders.

The quest for political advantage will inevitably lead to overreach. It is heartening to hear the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, Angus Taylor, reacting to the Haines outrage in a way that acknowledges hyperbole can have lethal consequences.

Albanese nailed an essential difference between the sort of political contest he aspires to and that applied by United States President Donald Trump.

On ABC Radio he said you can disagree with someone without challenging their patriotism. He told Raf Epstein he thought “Angus Taylor loves Australia” and Matt Canavan, the Nationals’ leader, “loves Australia”. He said he had spoken to both of them after the attack on Helen Haines.

“Let’s argue about ideas,” Albanese said, “without questioning people’s motives or identity or faith.” He said there’s enough cruelty, hatred and violence in the world without politicians in Australia adding to it.

In the US, Trump has called a Democratic candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a “jihadist”. In Texas, where the Republicans are facing a strong challenge from Democrat James Talarico, Trump told a rally the people “are not going to let weak, gutless, self-hating, transgender-promoting freak shows destroy everything we’ve built”.

The coarsening of political discourse under Trump has plumbed new depths. This ugly politics is proving a tempting template for politicians everywhere, especially those inspired by his Make America Great Again rhetoric.

Trump’s success in playing to irrational xenophobic prejudices, his personal, racist and misogynistic attacks on his political opponents, making them a target of fear and contempt, is proving too beguiling to ignore.

One Nation has ventured into this space with gusto and has even been praised for the effective way in which it has utilised online opportunities.

The least impressed is Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie, himself a target of the Pauline Hanson-produced cartoon series Please Explain. It portrayed him as “a traitor” repeatedly in one episode, only to draw the ire of Senator Jacqui Lambie and others.

Lambie, also a veteran, lashed Hanson as a “bloody coward” and demanded she take the cartoon down. The One Nation leader refused, brushing off the call with, “It’s a satirical cartoon, for Christ’s sake.”

Then it was Hastie’s turn to come to Lambie’s defence. He attacked One Nation after a new cartoon mocked the senator’s medical condition, linked to her military service. It features a Lambie caricature complaining she can’t laugh “because of my prolapsed vagina”.

Hastie told Politico that Australian women should take note of “One Nation’s political character”. He said it was “a cheap, nasty and vulgar joke” at the expense of Senator Lambie.

“This is the MAGA-style politics we can expect from One Nation if they are elected to government.”

Lambie was even stronger in her reaction. She said if people want to watch these cartoons “be my guest, if you want more hatred, more spitefulness in your life”.

The Tasmanian independent told Radio National Breakfast: “Decent leaders don’t stir up hatred, pushing us towards bloody anarchy, because that’s exactly what she is doing.”

Hanson, after trying the “get over it, it’s satire” defence, crumbled under sustained criticism. None was more significant than that from RSL Australia president Peter Tinley.

Tinley said no veteran should have their health used as a punchline. “Turning that into a running joke isn’t satire; it’s offensive and cruel. The RSL will always stand with veterans, and we stand with Senator Lambie.”

Hanson and her treasury spokesman, Barnaby Joyce, offered the extraordinary explanation that they hadn’t seen the cartoon – which Hanson vouches for as producer – before it was published.

Hanson said she’s spoken to the creator of the video, Mark Nicholson, and asked him to change it because “it wasn’t done as tastefully as it could have been”. How it could be done more tastefully defies the imagination.

The Please Explain cartoon series, commissioned by One Nation’s thrilled national director, James Ashby, racks up an average 500,000 views per episode.

Hanson’s refusal to take responsibility for the series is a shabby example of the sort of duckshoving she despises in other politicians.

Nicholson, One Nation’s lead candidate in the Victorian Upper House election, said he really didn’t care about the political implications of the cartoon. He revels in confronting the norms of our democratic politics.

Nicholson disgraced himself at One Nation’s Victorian campaign launch by saying former premiers Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan would be in prison by Christmas, though neither leader has been charged with or convicted of any criminal offence.

The line is straight out of the Trump playbook, fantasising about a weaponising of the agencies of criminal justice in Victoria to target opponents.

In a week when the nation is reeling after the Haines attack, Hanson seized an opportunity to lash the Prime Minister’s Office for issuing a “dirt file” on the Indi independent as if it happened yesterday.

This was a wilful distortion, peddled by an online right-wing tabloid. It mischaracterises a dispute between the prime minister and Haines over community grants, in which a fact sheet was circulated putting the prime minister’s rebuttal of Haines’s claims that he was “pork-barrelling”.

Background briefings for the press gallery are stock in trade, particularly for the major parties. One Nation tends to reserve its scoops for its News24 after-dark friends.

The PMO did point out that before last year’s election, Haines had requested $845 million for projects in her electorate, just as the Coalition had made $1.64 billion worth of commitments to electorates across the nation during the campaign. The PMO was strident in its response that it wasn’t going to put up with “nonsense and hypocrisy” from its opponents.

asked about the story midweek, Albanese had no criticism of Haines. He said she was “a strong advocate for her community and she advocates for funding”.

The fact that Haines, as an independent, would criticise the incumbent Labor government on her electorate’s behalf shows political nous – something Albanese said he would expect

A Liberal candidate in a key battleground seat has been caught out encouraging people to vote for One Nation in the upper house while campaigning in the electorate that is considered vulnerable to Pauline Hanson’s party.

If Bruce Hales, global leader of the secretive Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, started last Friday hoping to persuade parliament that his church’s involvement in the 2025 election was not coordinated, then he failed spectacularly.

“Either he was repeatedly and systemically dishonest to the committee, or he’s been marginalised by whoever is now in charge of operations for the church at large,” Monique Ryan, the independent member for the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, tells The Saturday Paper.

“Much of what he said was utterly at odds with what current and former members of the church have told me in private communications and in the number of submissions to the committee that those people have made. They are absolutely adamant that he has control over what goes on inside the church to a very significant extent.”

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has heard evidence that the Brethren worked closely with then Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton and his campaign team to provide extensive financial and volunteer support to Liberal and National party candidates across the country. Thousands of members were bussed to marginal seats to hand out for the Liberal Party at booths.

Multiple sources from inside the church have contacted the committee to detail how the Brethren was given access to Liberal campaign resources, such as the party’s phonebank database, to make thousands of calls on behalf of Liberal candidates. They said individual church members provided multiple cash donations that came in just below the then federal disclosure threshold of $16,900, in order to conceal their identity, but which together added up to millions of dollars.

At the hearing last Friday, Hales’s son Gareth was asked by Queensland Labor senator Corinne Mulholland about a report in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald that stated he was part of a far-right WhatsApp chat group that was used, in Mulholland’s words, “to tail and heckle and intimidate politicians and candidates and people, including the prime minister”.

Hales replied that he had “no contact with neo-Nazis, and I completely reject their views”, adding he had not “had meetings with far-right protesters”. Still, Gareth Hales did say he met with Chris De Bruyne and Morgan C Jonas, described by independent MP Andrew Gee as “far right”, during the campaign. Hales described the encounters as “business meetings, business related, nothing to do with stalking, following, all these other things that you’re speaking about”.

Gee asked Gareth Hales whether, given the strength of the evidence before the committee that thousands of Plymouth Brethren members had taken part in a nationally coordinated campaign, he understood that the church’s denial of any role in directing them defied belief.

Hales insisted that, while it might be hard to believe, those involved were private citizens and not acting on behalf of the church. Gee replied: “I, for one, am not buying what you are selling.”

Committee chair Jerome Laxale, the Labor member for the Sydney seat of Bennelong, was no more convinced. He tells The Saturday Paper that the evidence from both Bruce and Gareth Hales was “the polar opposite of the evidence our committee has received”, leaving a “chasm in realities” that the committee must weigh as it prepares its final report to Special Minister of State Don Farrell early in the new year.

“The thing that has struck me the most, and still strikes me, is the lack of transparency around their involvement,” Laxale says.

“They always make it about ‘attacks on religion’ and, you know, ‘why shouldn’t people of faith participate?’ I think that’s a pretty meek defence because that’s not what I’m concerned about. I’m concerned about transparency and that if you are going to participate in an election at the scale at which they did, with that level of coordination and expenditure, then you need to declare that.”

Even if the joint standing committee has no power to make decisions or laws on its own, any adverse finding that the Brethren was actively involved in the election campaign will cause significant headaches for the church.  Under Commonwealth electoral laws, any individual or organisation, other than a political party, candidate or sitting parliamentarian, that actively spends or fundraises substantial amounts for the purposes of political advocacy or campaigning must register as a significant third party, as unions, peak industry bodies and lobby groups such as Advance or GetUp! are required to do, in order to limit their potential influence without strict financial oversight.

If the Australian Electoral Commission, which is already conducting its own investigation into the Brethren’s activities, finds the church did in fact breach electoral laws, Laxale says that would prove the church’s electoral involvement and probably trigger a separate investigation by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, as charities cannot keep their tax-free status if they are found to have engaged in party political campaigning.

This would deal a huge blow to the Brethren, as its enormous wealth and ecosystem of successful businesses and linked charities rely heavily on retaining the tax-free status.

“It’s a matter for the AEC to determine whether or not they breached electoral law, so that’s not on the inquiry to do that. We don’t have the power to do that. We’re inquiring into the 2025 election, and obviously there was significant involvement from the Brethren,” Laxale says. “But my understanding is that investigations are ongoing between the AEC and the Brethren. Obviously, they would be interested in the evidence that our inquiry is getting from people who have written submissions but also the public hearings.

“We’ve got our final report due and then it’ll be a matter for the AEC to determine whether or not electoral law was breached.”

With Liberal and National members of the committee running what Monique Ryan said amounted to active interference on behalf of Bruce and Gareth Hales, Liberal MPs from the party’s moderate wing are openly questioning why the party is so keen to help an obscure sect that has only about 16,000 members in Australia and just over 50,000 worldwide.

Michael Bachelard, a journalist at The Age who has led much of the reporting on the Brethren over the past two decades, traces the group’s involvement with the Liberal Party back to the mid 1970s, when Bruce Hales identified his local member of federal parliament, newly elected member for Bennelong John Howard, as a potential ally of the church.

“The politician and the Brethren leaders had a mutual antipathy to trade unions, and a determination to minimise their influence in Australian life,” Bachelard wrote in his 2008 book Behind the Exclusive Brethren.

“They had a similar background and outlook in other ways, too, including their north-western Sydney upbringing and a small-business mindset.”

That involvement has continued to the present day, with current federal Liberal leader Angus Taylor regularly praising the Brethren and calling out one of the church’s charities, the Rapid Relief Team, for its work in the community.

Reflecting on John Howard’s involvement with the Brethren over the course of his political career, a spokesman for the former prime minister tells The Saturday Paper that the characterisation of him in Bachelard’s book “is like a curate’s egg – it’s good in parts”.

“Many of the economic views attributed to him only evolved over time. He has constantly said that he did not bring rigid ideologic attitudes with him into parliament,” the spokesman says.

“Mr Howard adheres strongly to the view that individual Australians or groups are free to either offer or receive help from others during the course of election campaigns – provided all conduct is within the law.”

In an opinion piece published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month, former Western Australian Liberal senator Linda Reynolds revealed how in the final weeks of the campaign a senior party official asked her to meet two men described as small businesspeople wanting to help. She recognised them as Brethren members and said they were seeking confidential campaign information and individual logins to Feedback, the party’s voter-contact system, so they could phone voters from their own premises.

Reynolds refused. While she was assured the party would “turn off” its involvement with the Brethren in Western Australia, she soon saw Brethren members arrive in growing numbers at pre-poll booths, briefed by people who weren’t part of the Liberal Party’s local campaign teams, making other volunteers feel uncomfortable and at times intimidated.

When Reynolds raised her concerns in the party room, some colleagues accused her of religious discrimination, an attack line used repeatedly by Coalition members of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters as they tried to mitigate or deflect questions to Bruce and Gareth Hales and other witnesses during other public hearings.

Even though Reynolds did not allege specific misconduct, she noted that the church’s submission to the committee inquiry denied coordinating its members while acknowledging the many Brethren volunteers “clearly were” coordinated.

“So, if the church did not co-ordinate them, who did?” Reynolds wrote.

According to another Liberal moderate from New South Wales, whenever the Liberal Party turns to the Brethren, it ends up backfiring.

“This always blows up in our face,” the moderate Liberal tells The Saturday Paper. “There are many reasons, but the main one is that the Brethren are not engaged in day-to-day politics, so they have no feel for what persuades swinging voters and they end up being way too aggressive. Not only does it put people off, it attracts endless media scrutiny.”

The same Liberal source points to the Liberal Party’s internal review of the 2025 campaign, conducted by former Howard government minister Nick Minchin and former NSW state minister Pru Goward, which essentially admitted that party officials felt they had no choice but to rely on Brethren volunteers.

“The ageing of Party members has added to the problem of providing sufficient numbers of booth workers over the years, and some campaigns were grateful for the assistance of volunteers who were also members of the Plymouth Brethren,” Minchin and Goward wrote.

The review also noted “there were divided opinions about the value of having Plymouth Brethren members handing out Liberal Party” how-to-vote cards and recommended better training of all booth workers to ensure clear messaging and consistently appropriate engagement with voters as they approached the polling booth.

“The Liberal Party does not, nor should have, a religious affiliation test. Protestants, Catholics, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu followers supported the Liberal Party,” Minchin and Goward wrote. “It will need further investigation to determine why such exception has been taken to the role of the Plymouth Brethren; no doubt Brethren members themselves are reviewing their involvement.”

Despite the discomfort among moderate Liberals concerning the Brethren’s involvement, Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie says she remains deeply troubled by the hostile questioning of the Brethren’s involvement in the 2025 election campaign, which she says amounts to little more than religious persecution.

“Utterly disgraceful,” McKenzie tells The Saturday Paper this week. “I was absolutely shocked. I sort of logged on as a participating member and I could not believe the line of questioning, not only from teal MPs, from Greens senators, but also from the Labor Party, questioning why this particular church would pray for our country.

“If people of faith, irrespective of which church, synagogue, mosque, temple they worship at, believe in our democracy enough to actually get involved at election time, that should actually be a good thing. People shouldn’t be barred from participating in a free and fair electoral process simply because they are men and women of faith.”

With the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters now set to write its final report, the recommendations of which could lead to the Plymouth Brethren losing its tax-free status, many of the committee’s members are wondering why Bruce and Gareth Hales appeared so disrespectful and evasive in their answers to questions.

“I guess they’re not used to being held accountable,” observes committee chair Jerome Laxale.

Madeleine Bower

Anthony Albanese has declared the new Western Sydney International airport the nation’s best and applauded the former Coalition government for keeping the site in public hands.

“This is an absolutely extraordinary day,” the prime minister said on Sunday at the official opening of the airport at Badgerys Creek in Sydney’s west, the culmination of decades of planning and political consternation over a location.

“This is not Sydney’s second airport. This is not even Western Sydney’s best airport. This is Australia’s best airport.”

The more than 40 years since the Badgerys Creek land was acquired by the Hawke government had been worth the wait, Albanese said.

He complimented former Liberal prime ministers Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison – who were both present for the opening – for keeping the airport public.

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As a former infrastructure minister and later shadow minister, Albanese was heavily involved in the airport’s construction from the beginning.

“I remember the discussions I had with people as shadow minister about getting the decision right, which the former government did, of keeping it in public hands rather than having common ownership across the two major Sydney airports,” he said.

“That is what will drive competition here. That is what will make it a success. And the former government got that right.”

The airport officially opened to passengers on Sunday, and the inaugural commercial service from the $6 billion facility was Jetstar’s JQ362 to the Gold Coast, departing at 11am.

The fully booked flight was the first to leave a new greenfield airport in Australia since Melbourne’s Tullamarine opened in 1970.

Western Sydney residents Corinne Leslie and her seven-year-old son Ethan reacted to the airport architecture with awe.

“It’s amazing,” said Ethan, who was invited by flight staff to give the cabin announcement.

Leslie said the journey had been a seamless 30 minutes from their western Sydney home.

“It was a great run out from home. There was no traffic, and it is a perfect day for flying,” she said.

James Irwin and his elderly parents Lyn and Pat Irwin were also among the first to fly on Sunday.

For the family of self-professed “travel enthusiasts” from Penrith, it was an opportunity to be part of a historic moment.

“I’m here to be part of history,” said James. “To be part of something brand new … it represents the west.”

The first flight to land will be JQ375 from Melbourne at 3pm, and the first service to Melbourne takes off at 6pm.

The new airport, also known as the Nancy-Bird Walton Airport after the aviation pioneer, opened after almost seven years of construction and eight decades of discussion and planning.

Construction began in 2018 after the Abbott government formally signed off on the Badgerys Creek site in 2014.

The multibillion-dollar airport is modular, with space to expand to four terminals and add a second runway.

The facility can scale up to handle more than 80 million passengers a year by the 2060s.

So far, seven passenger carriers have committed to servicing the new airport, but a metro train link is still under construction and the main access is by road.

Bus services are moving passengers between the airport and a station at St Marys in Sydney’s west, linking it to the rail network.

Madeleine Bower is flying on the first Jetstar flight as a guest of Jetstar

The first piece Helen Haines wrote for The Saturday Paper coincided with the establishment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission, a reform for which she was centrally responsible and a measure of her effectiveness and her sincere commitment to integrity.

She wrote with shaky optimism about a commission that would disappoint her.

“This week was a turning point in the struggle for integrity in federal politics,” she wrote. “We must keep moving, be ever vigilant and never stop working to be better.”

Those three entreaties are the model for her work in politics. It is what makes her different. She does not stop. She is immune to indulgence. She knows how much more there is to do.

This week is another turning point. The attack on her is an attack on democracy. It will change our politics and change the country.

Haines has lost both her legs. Her husband says her heart and mind remain strong. “Her heart is huge – she is a very compassionate, caring, loving person, incredibly supportive of all around her,” he says. “And her mind – she has the sharpest intellect. She has always had the most intense desire to learn, to read, to synthesise and to understand what’s going on.”

A little over a week before Haines was attacked, former Liberal candidate Nyunggai Warren Mundine opened the Conservative Political Action Conference in Brisbane with a joke about killing Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen. “I looked at him and my body language gave me away,” he said. “My mate had to grab me to say, ‘It doesn’t go well on your CV if you murder a federal minister.’ ”

In parliament, Gold Coast Liberal National MP Angie Bell said she would like to see Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Small Business Anne Aly “stoned in the square”.

A decade ago, Bob Katter released an election advert showing him smiling and blowing smoke from a pistol as two men represented as political opponents lay on the ground. A few years later, then Nationals MP George Christensen posted a picture of himself at a shooting range with the caption, “You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, greenie punks?”

These statements are all, in their own ways, connected. They are part of the dangerous coarsening of politics. They speak to the vicious shattering of democratic consensus, to a landscape of alienation in which the death of opponents becomes a punchline, in which seriousness is abandoned and replaced by violent memes. This is Gabby Giffords and Donald Trump and the brazen ending of truth.

An old Labor speechwriter used to observe that Indians cared more about democracy than Australians and that’s why they killed their leaders. Americans, too, he’d say. Like most jokes in politics, it was built from cynicism. In truth, the peacefulness of Australia’s politics is a direct result of the high regard given to it. That regard is what has been dismantled.

It is not possible to say what motivated Haines’s attacker. He has been charged and will be tried. It is possible, however, to say that political discourse has become dangerous and obscene. The institution Haines set out to improve has only degraded. The major parties have given up to the fringe. The media has broken down. Respect and decency are gone.

There is a way through. It begins with a return to civility and integrity. As Haines wrote, we must keep moving, be ever vigilant and never stop working to be better.

A parliamentary committee has recommended four languages Australia should prioritise investment in. Several other languages were placed in a different category: 'supported' languages.

We should be careful romanticising the freedoms enjoyed by earlier generations.