David Penberthy: The most miserable realisation from this rotten week

We’re exposed to a 24/7 cycle of hatred and abuse, writes David Penberthy. And what’s most worrying is many perpetrators happily put their names and faces to the most despicable comments.

In the wake of Christchurch one strong theme has emerged.

Stop the internet, I want to get off.

Much has been made of the stampede towards the exit door in Canberra. In the partisan political space, the slew of departures on the conservative side has been described as the desertion of a sinking ship.

In the public arena, it is said that all these vanishing MPs are simply salivating at the prospect of cashing in on the old parliamentary pension.

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While noting these two schools of thought, I would throw one more into the mix. It’s an important one, because it goes beyond those people who choose a life in politics. And it is one that has been underscored in the most miserable fashion during this rotten week.

My theory is that the decision to leave public life is being galvanised — even driven entirely — by a desire to escape what has become a 24/7 cycle of hatred and abuse.

What was once an occasionally willing contest of ideas has become an emotionally draining non-stop shouting match. To borrow a line from Spinal Tap, the volume of public life has been permanently turned up to 11.

I am jumping off @Twitter for a few weeks. The conversation about what happened in Christchurch on here is completely toxic - a heaving mass of shouted opinions and poor manners - it is the worst of the internet on show. We have to sort this out, it is causing so much damage.

— Clare O'Neil MP (@ClareONeilMP) March 18, 2019

Social media is the worst offender, but online discussion across traditional media platforms is often putridly aggressive, too. And it is doing people’s heads in.

A couple of days ago a federal MP from Victoria, Clare O’Neil, declared she’d had enough.

“I am jumping off @Twitter for a few weeks,” she tweeted. “The conversation about what happened in Christchurch on here is completely toxic — a heaving mass of shouted opinions and poor manners — it is the worst of the internet on show. We have to sort this out. It is causing so much damage.”

O’Neil is right that Christchurch has provided the most toxic display yet of this culture but it’s merely the latest manifestation of something that’s been worsening for some time.

A police officer stands guard with a rose at the service for a victim of the Friday March 15 mosque shootings in Christchurch. Picture: AP/Vincent Yu

While issues around Islam, terror and migration deliver the worst examples, once-civil debates around party politics, gender politics, race relations, even the (supposed) escape of sport have all become vehicles for online bile.

There was an example of this just a couple of weeks ago involving Alex Turnbull, the son of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

You’ve got to give Alex Turnbull credit as a fiercely loyal son. He’s also the proud author of a tweet that stands as a shabby bellwether for what passes for commentary these days.

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I won’t reprint it here, as it would breach our publishing guidelines. In essence, shorn of its graphic language, Turnbull Jr’s tweet (inspired by Tony Abbott and John Howard’s support for Cardinal Pell) said the only reason to join the Liberal Party in 2019 was to pull rorts for your mates, have sex with your staff, vilify gay people and molest young boys.

Alex Turnbull is a smart bloke. He’s 37 years old, university educated, married with children, and works in finance in Singapore.

Yet this intelligent father was as proud as punch to put his name to this, as were thousands of other Australians, almost 5000 of whom either retweeted or liked his tweet within hours of it being published.

Father, husband, university educated, finance professional and tweeter of questionable opinions, Alex Turnbull. Picture: Hollie Adams

In the context of Christchurch, there is a debate to be had about the generalisations that have often infected discussions of Islamic terrorism, national security and border protection, and whether those generalisations have legitimised or fanned white supremacist sentiment.

Yet the manner in which that debate has been conducted this week has been beyond appalling.

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On the extreme Left of politics, one series of tweets struck me as exemplary. It was written by the ABC’s Clementine Ford in response to reports that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was considering legal action against The Project’s Waleed Aly over his scathing editorial suggesting Morrison had stated in shadow cabinet that the Liberals should make political capital from anti-Muslim sentiment.

“Shut the f*** up Scott Morrison, you cheap synthetic dildo,” Ford wrote, doing her bit to shake the bias tag at the national broadcaster. “You are f***ing the country badly and you need to be thrown out.”

Meanwhile, on the extreme Right of politics, the lunatics weren’t so much chastened by the horror of Christchurch but emboldened by it.

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For a chilling hour or so on Monday I thought I had lost my friend and radio co-host Will Goodings to early retirement at the grand old age of 34 after he spent a sickening afternoon trawling through some of the comments submitted to our own Facebook site that day.

AFLW star Tayla Harris was trolled over this photo of her kicking the ball during a recent game. Picture: Michael Willson/AFL Media

The comments were in response to the fact that Monday’s program was co-hosted by three eminent South Australian Muslims to ensure their voices were part of our discussion around Christchurch.

Most listeners applauded the move as a welcome exercise in bringing people together and gaining an overdue insight into how our Muslim friends feel.

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Several listeners did not. And here’s the thing — as we saw with the open abuse directed at the AFLW star Tayla Harris over that wonderful photograph, it’s actually wrong now to talk about “anonymous” keyboard warriors, as many, many people are happy to write the most despicable things under their own names.

The thing that rattled Will the most was a two-word Facebook post from a man who uses his real name and photograph, who names the school he attended, the career he had before his retirement, and lists his interests as “Alt-Right politics”. His two-word statement in defence of the loathsome Fraser Anning simply read: “Sieg Heil.”

Will wondered out loud to me whether he could really be arsed doing a radio show — or indeed anything — for a bloke like this, and whether a Jim’s Mowing round might make for a less emotionally draining career.

Happily I talked him off the ledge. The moderate voices are still the majority voices. But it’s becoming much harder to hear them among the hateful shouting.

@penbo

Originally published as David Penberthy: The most miserable realisation from this rotten week