Some of you may be interested in a bit of potted history. There’s quite a few incidents of political violence. I didn’t know, for example,

Labor leader Arthur Calwell was an opponent of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and it was after a “rowdy meeting” about conscription in Sydney in 1966 that he was shot in the jaw by Peter Kocan, who had a leaning to far-right politics and was evidently ill.

Calwell forgave Kocan, who became a writer of some renown.

The authors conclude:

Democracy is a practice as much as a system. It requires for its survival a steady nurturing by those – citizens as well as representatives – who perform it. Helen Haines herself has been in the forefront of efforts to restore trust in a political system that has generated disaffection among many Australians in recent years. She has been repaid with a violence that is the polar opposite of all that she stands for.

Australia’s world-leading history of electoral innovation was partly an effort to mitigate against violence. But the innovations of an earlier generation may not be enough to defend democracy from today’s threats, not least those arising from a social media ecosystem that draws its oxygen from base emotions.