Clearly Not A Friend Of The Whole Family!

A man has been charged over the alleged attack on Australian MP Helen Haines on Monday.A 43-year-old remains in custody and will appear in court on Wednesday. Here's a recap of what we know:

'We' being the mainstream media, who like everyone else these day, has realised that social media is where everyone goes to for the real news these days.... 

The suspect has not been formally identified, but he was named by local media as Brendan Nugent.His father, Rod, says he and his partner were friends with Helen Haines "for more than 20 years", and calls the attack "devastating and unfathomable"

Victorian independent MP Helen Haines was at the opening of a dog park in Mansfield on Monday, out and about in her sprawling electorate of Indi, talking to locals and moving freely. Later in the afternoon, at 3.35pm, she was unpacking a car outside her electorate office in Wangaratta when a man understood to be known to authorities struck her with his car. He allegedly completed a U-turn when he saw Haines. What happened will urgently change how MPs assess their personal safety, not least because local settings are no longer free from danger.

’Known to the authorities’, God, I’m so sick of that term! It usually means 'Yes, we know they are a danger but we can't be bothered to do anything about it yet, because it's less work for us when they finally kill someone...'

There is much we don’t know about what has happened, including the motivation of the alleged attacker. But a dark tide of threats and abuse has been rising.

For years, federal politicians have had an ominous sense that something was shifting in Australia’s national life.

You mean, when politician ignore the desires of their constituents to persue their own diametrically opposed agenda, there may be anger?  You don't say! 

Long having warned against the growing intensity of political debate, Albanese reflected the grave shock of the country in the hours after the incident. Human rights commission says ‘violence has no place in our society’ after alleged attack. Along with the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, Albanese revealed that recorded threats against politicians numbered more than 1,067 last financial year, as the cohort of office holders requiring around-the-clock close personal protection grew.

And it's not just the Land Down Under.... 

But the alleged attack on Haines shows something rapidly being lost in our politics. The shift in sentiment can no longer be dismissed as social media noise or harmless comment.

More needs to be done to stop a normalisation of violence and gratuitous insults. That includes the importation of rhetoric from the US and Europe, like calls for politicians to be locked up or harmed for their decisions. The politicians dishing out verbal attacks themselves, or inciting individuals to hate online, must be held accountable.

Would that be the Left wing ones as well?  Or do they still get a pass...?