Parliament’s sledging truce: it lasted 24 hours

(As published in Mumbrella, 28 October 2026)

On Monday, MPs bowed their heads for Helen Haines. On Tuesday, the Speaker was calling them to order again. 

Helen Haines, the independent member for Indi, lost both legs after being rammed by a car outside her Wangaratta office on 19 October. Police say it was a targeted attack. The motive is still unknown. 

What happened next in Canberra is known. Her husband, Phil, asked MPs to think not only about their words but about who might hear them. A full day of tributes followed. Twenty-four hours later, Speaker Milton Dick told the House the sledging was “not even funny”. 

How politicians behave affects all of us. The public stopped treating the yelling as theatre long ago, and social media makes sure nobody can ignore it. 

Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett told Senate estimates her agency received 785 reports of adverse content about federal parliamentarians in the first half of this year, describing an “instant pipeline of hate” into people’s homes. 

We’ve been here before. Dennis Shanahan, who has watched parliament from the press gallery for more than three decades and nine prime ministers, told The Australian’s podcast The Front that after the death of Labor MP Greg Wilton in 2000, talk of a kinder parliament lasted about 48 hours. Then came a session so rowdy that a then-record six members were thrown out.  

He also raised the “sh*t sheet” the Prime Minister’s office circulated to journalists about Haines weeks before the attack, after she questioned a $6 million grant to Marrickville Golf Club in his electorate. Shanahan’s point was simple: the habits haven’t changed, and a leader who said plainly he wouldn’t put out another one would lift the debate. 

Neither side is clean. In 2011, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott appeared at an anti-carbon tax rally outside Parliament House and was photographed beside placards, one reading “Ditch the witch”. 

The next year he told parliament the Gillard government was “a government which should already have died of shame”. Weeks earlier, broadcaster Alan Jones had said Julia Gillard’s father died of shame. 

Everyone talks of taking the temperature down. Nobody in Canberra wants to go first.  

In the days after the Bondi terror attack last December, NSW Premier Chris Minns was asked about the Opposition. He said he couldn’t speak highly enough of the bipartisan way Liberal leader Kellie Sloane, the local member, had approached the tragedy. 

In February, Roy Morgan found 56% of NSW voters approved of his performance, including a large majority of Coalition supporters. His protest laws are contested. This piece is about tone, not policy. 

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas won a second term in March with what he called the best result his party had ever achieved. On the night, he gave credit to One Nation’s Cory Bernardi for his party’s result. He warned his colleagues not to mistake the win for adulation.  

Then he read Henry Lawson: praise your own country, “but to run no other down”. 

Neither ducks a fight. They pick it on the issue, not the person. 

In media training, we tell executives to assume every microphone is live and every clip will travel without its context. The test isn’t whether the other side deserved it. It’s how a seven-second grab looks to someone who doesn’t know the backstory, and who might be having the worst week of their life.

Parliament will probably drift back to form. The clip that wins the day still wins the feed. 

What has moved is the cost. 

Below is the poem Malinauskas read from, as The Land printed it in December 1924, two years after Lawson’s death.

Tis the duty of Australians, in the bush and in the town,
To forever praise their country, but to run no other down.
Not to start at every nothing with the boast that bluffs and halts,
But to love their young Australia and explain away her faults.

Not to lose their heads in triumph, nor be bitter in defeat
Not to rave about the coming of a fighting man – or fleet.
When a man, or nation visits, in the hey-day of his pride,
’Tis the duty of Australians to be kind and dignified.

We can worship foreign talent – give our money, hearts and hands,
While we send our own, embittered, to win bread in foreign lands.
We are great to men who peddle – men who kick or bat the ball,
While our duty to the stranger is “Australia’s over all.”

’Tis our place, when asked directions by a stranger in the land,
Not to jerk our thumb and mutter, for he may not understand.
We are free and we’re enlightened, but at times we may forget,
That the grand old-world politeness hasn’t ruined England yet.

’Tis our duty to the stranger – landed, maybe, but an hour –
To give all the information and assistance in our power.
To give audience to the new chum and to let the old chums wait,
Lest his memory be embittered by his first days in the State.

’Tis our duty, when he’s foreign, and his English very young,
To find out and take him somewhere where he’ll hear his native tongue.
To give him our spare moment, and our pleasure to defer –
He’ll be a father of Australians, as our foreign fathers were!