In this age of shouting, I’ve noticed a startling new kind of complaint

October 23, 2026 — 4:00am

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Moments like these are always painfully hard to process. We’re trying to make sense of things at precisely the time we know the least, when the facts are still emerging, and each new detail seems to alter the meaning of what came before. That clashes with our need for certainty, to impose meaning on things. And here, there are two irresistible temptations: to generalise from the specific tragedy in front of us, and to seek the explanation that exonerates ourselves.

That helps explain much of the online discourse in the wake of the awful (now formally alleged) attack on Helen Haines. No meaningful information about the alleged perpetrator was necessary before people were prepared to point the finger at One Nation, or alternatively to assume it was all a case of mistaken identity, and that a One Nation politician was actually the target.

Here, we see the familiar pattern of people attempting to categorise an attack as the responsibility of one’s political foes, to preserve the categorisation of good and bad guys we’ve already established.

The first problem with this is that it rushes well ahead of what we know: in this case, police are yet even to allege a motive, let alone assign a political affiliation. Another is that even if both guilt and motive could be established, we’d be dealing with a single case. To extrapolate from that is dangerously loose, especially in a time like ours........

© Brisbane Times