Demonise Them, Then Demand Calm

A 60-year-old father is in Geelong hospital with multiple facial fractures and bleeding on the brain after being attacked with a baseball bat in his own front yard in Torquay. His crime was a corflute. His name is being withheld to protect his family.

According to One Nation, he went outside after hearing a disturbance and confronted people damaging the party's signs on his property. At 7.45pm on Sunday, on Scorpio Street, he was set upon. Pauline Hanson, after visiting him, said he had been kicked so badly he lost consciousness and was bleeding from essentially every orifice in his face. "It was a vicious attack," she said. "It wasn't just a punch. Even now, with the bleed, it still could be life-threatening." Colleen Harkin described it as "a savage attack on a person just because they've got a One Nation corflute in their own private property."

A 37-year-old Hampton Park man has been charged with intentionally causing injury and other assault offences and remanded to appear on 10 November. A 14-year-old boy from the Casey area was cautioned.

A caution. Following an incident that left a man with facial fractures and bleeding on the brain, a boy walks out with a caution. Police exercised their discretion. The public deserves to know why a caution was considered appropriate and what role the boy allegedly played. So does the family.

His wife and two young children are facing a long recovery alongside him. He is self-employed, the household's only income earner, and his work vehicle was badly damaged in the same incident. Every day he cannot work is another financial burden. The family's fundraiser passed $80,000 within a day, including $2,000 out of Hanson's own pocket. Hanson and Harkin visited him in hospital and helped rally practical support for his family. That is what a party looks like when it is not embarrassed by its own supporters.

Help the family here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-a-victorian-father-and-his-family-after-a-brutal-attack

Victoria votes in 24 days. Putting a sign on your own fence should be the cheapest democratic act available to a citizen. It is now the thing that puts you in an ambulance.

The pattern is not one street. In Ballarat the same weekend, Meaghers Hotel was hit: "racist" sprayed across One Nation candidate Paul Ballinger's posters, paint over customers' cars, thousands of dollars of damage to a publican who backed One Nation openly. The Herald Sun called it a legup for One Nation. It is. Every act of vandalism is a billboard.

And the backlash is tracking something real. Voters are flocking to One Nation, and the institutional response has been to treat that as a malfunction rather than a message.

In August, students walked out of school to protest the party. In Melbourne they hung a papier-mâché Hanson from a pole and let the kids take turns with a stick until lollies fell out. In Sydney they chanted: "high school, uni, teachers too, Pauline Hanson, we're coming for you." And: "racist, sexist, anti-queer, Pauline Hanson not welcome here."

Former Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam told the Melbourne rally it gave her hope. Greens MP Jenny Leong worked the Sydney crowd.

Adults helped turn a political opponent into an object for children to strike. A piñata is what you make for a thing you have decided not to argue with. You do not debate it. You hand children a stick and let them have a turn.

On Tuesday the Victorian Greens leader, Ellen Sandell, said volunteers are "the heart of our political movements and our democracy, and they deserve to be safe." She is right but she should also ask why fellow Greens politicians supported rallies where children struck an effigy of a political opponent.

That is what makes the "lower the temperature" sermons so galling. The people who helped build the furnace are now handing out thermometers.

The graffiti says racist. The chant says racist. The word does the work an argument should do, and it has spent a decade being used as a way of not having to make one. A voter worried about immigration, housing or national sovereignty is entitled to a hearing. Spraying a verdict across his property supplies none, and it is easier to spray a word than to answer a policy. One Nation Victorian leader Warren Pickering's version is shorter: "If you don't like someone's politics, you vote accordingly. You don't assault them."

Victorian Labor Premier Ben Carroll told Melbourne in September: "One Nation terrifies me." To be fair to the Premier, he condemned Sunday's attack and did it well: "Whether you're wearing a red, a blue, an orange or a green T-shirt, they are volunteers, they are out there doing what they believe is right, and no one should be coming under attack." Good. Now he needs to extend that same respect to the party he said terrified him. They are still fellow citizens in an orange shirt.

Police will sort out who swung what. The political class has its own question to answer, and it can start by auditing its own words before it writes another sermon about civility.

Tell people often enough that a party is a menace and its supporters are beyond the pale, and you make intimidation easier to justify. A sign on a fence stops being a piece of plastic and starts being a provocation.

A man put a sign in his yard. He should be able to leave it up and come home to his children. Everyone who cannot say that without consulting their notes never really believed it.

Put the sign back up.

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
– Isaac Asimov