‘For the first time, I feel unsafe.’ Trump attack has fearful Australian MPs on edge

When a senior cabinet minister took up an invitation for dinner at a private home a few years ago, the security team started planning for the event days in advance. Officers turned up to check the street, inspect the house and consider whether intruders could find their way over the back fence. On the night of the meal, they watched every entrance to the home just in case a threat arose. And the dinner went smoothly.

That sort of security can seem excessive in a country that sees itself as a sunny society that knows how to keep itself together when others fall apart. But there is no secret that Australia’s most senior politicians are surrounded by security details to ensure their personal safety. In fact, every signal says the threats are greater than ever.

Illustration: Simon Letch

So the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump naturally raises questions about whether Australians will ever witness the kind of deadly violence seen in Pennsylvania last weekend. The former home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, told The Australian this week that a similar attack was only a matter of time. Former veterans’ affairs minister Darren Chester suggested tighter security for politicians two years ago.

Many politicians are on edge about their security but feel they should not say too much out loud. They do not want to look like they are demanding more staff or more spending on their offices and homes. At the same time, it is their job to get out into their communities. They are meant to make it as easy as possible for anyone to approach them.

“Now, for the first time, I feel unsafe,” says one. The concern is not just about the news from America. It is also about the increasing volume of vitriol being sent to politicians on email and social media, including death threats. It is about hearing that someone knows your home address. And it is about the casual moments when a random person, probably unwell, will confront a politician in the street.

“Our homes are vulnerable, and we’re vulnerable in the community,” says another federal politician. “I don’t think the security people in Canberra understand the realities in the community.”

The Melbourne office of Jewish MP Josh Burns was vandalised with anti-Zionist graffiti in June.Credit: Chris Hopkins

It is time to rethink the Australian confidence that foreign atrocities cannot happen here. The complacency rests, in part, on the fact that Australia has no gun culture like that in the United States. A loner who is intent on murder cannot get access to an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle as easily as could Thomas Matthew Crooks, the young man who tried to kill Trump last Saturday. But why assume Australians will be spared from political violence because they are protected from the worst guns?

The American gun culture is also absent in the United Kingdom, but that did not stop assailants killing two British politicians, Jo Cox and David Amess, in the past decade. The fact is that threats against Australian politicians are on the rise: Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw told parliament last month that the police received 279 reports about security threats to politicians in 2021, but this rose to 725 reports from last July to this May. We do not yet know the number for the full year.

It is not as if political violence is new to Australia. An Irish republican, Henry O’Farrell, shot Prince Alfred, the second son of Queen Victoria, in Sydney in 1868. A troubled teenager, Peter Kocan, tried to kill Labor leader Arthur Calwell in 1966. The body of Donald Mackay, the anti-drugs campaigner murdered in 1977, has never been found. In Australia’s first political assassination, Phuong Canh Ngo ordered the killing of state Labor MP John Newman in Sydney in 1994.

Those events seem like ancient history, but regular incidents still turn politicians into targets.

A school student threw a sandwich at prime minister Julia Gillard in 2013 and it seemed funny to some at the time. An unhappy voter slapped the then Northern Territory chief minister Natasha Fyles with a cream pie in 2023 and was charged, rightly, with assault. A man headbutted former prime minister Tony Abbott in Hobart in 2017 and went to jail for two months. A young woman slapped an egg on then prime minister Scott Morrison in Albury before the 2019 election and was sentenced to community service.

Even the minor incidents, the ones we might dismiss with a shrug, normalise the idea of making the politician the object of attack. There is plenty of blame to go around about why this idea takes hold, given the way politicians spend so much time attacking each other and the way the media can heighten the conflict, but it is easy to see where the spiral leads.

“We’re not the same as America, but we’re on the same trend,” says another politician. The sheer volume of hate grew worse during the pandemic, he says, as some people reacted with fury to lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Now he thinks it is dramatically worse because of the divisions over Palestine and Israel.

The danger signs are in the blockades at electorate offices. The right to free speech means pro-Palestinian protesters should be able to speak their minds outside the offices where politicians do their jobs, but their actions are not always benign. Some of the protesters have menaced electorate office staff, as if their right to free speech also means a right to get physical. The vandalism turns the electorate offices into targets, as I wrote last month.

The great fear is that incendiary claims lead to real flames. It is natural to dismiss the overheated rhetoric when Greens leader Adam Bandt accuses Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton of being complicit in genocide in Gaza, for instance, but there is always the risk that someone falls for the line. What if someone with a weak mind actually believes an Australian politician is to blame for the slaughter of civilians?

Australia likes to think it does not have delusional killers like the man who tried to kill Trump. But it does. Kocan, the man who tried to assassinate Calwell, went on to become an award-winning poet and novelist. On the night of the shooting, however, he had a sad justification for what he had done. “Unless I did something out of the ordinary I realised I would remain a nobody all my life,” he told police. “I came to the conclusion that however hard it was I would have to do something that would set me apart from other nobodies.”

Could it happen again? Let’s hope not. But now is the time to cool the rhetoric and tighten security in the hope it never does.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.

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