The alleged attack on independent MP Helen Haines in Wangaratta has shocked a nation whose politics is normally peaceful even by the standards of mature democracies. A hard-working, decent parliamentarian with a strong moral compass and a gift for achieving consensus, Haines seems an especially unlikely figure to attract the kind of brutality allegedly visited on her on Monday.

We do not yet know the motivation behind this alleged attack. But there is no question Australia’s politics have been fractious over the past 12 months. Violence, literal and rhetorical, has been a growing feature of the landscape, shaping the relations between citizens and politicians – and among one another. The Bondi beach massacre of 14 December 2025 is widely regarded as a tragic turning point in this regard.

But like other features of our public landscape, both good and bad, political violence has a history in Australia – one from which we may learn.

Australian assassinations

Australian leaders have mostly avoided the assassinations more common in other places. Even Australia’s parent culture, Great Britain, lost a prime minister to an assassination in 1812 when John Bellingham shot Spencer Perceval through the heart in the lobby of the House of Commons.

The 20th century alone saw two sitting American presidents murdered, along with leading activists and major aspirants to higher office. Two Indian prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi, were slain in the century’s later decades, as well as an Israeli statesman in Yitzhak Rabin.

No Australian prime ministers or premiers have been assassinated to date. The deaths of figures such as Joseph Lyons, John Curtin and Ben Chifley were the result of natural causes. The circumstances of Liberal prime minister Harold Holt’s death are well known but, notwithstanding conspiracy theories, did not involve foul play.

Still, assassination attempts have occasionally blighted Australia’s political landscape. The first came in 1868 with the visit of Prince Alfred, second in line to Queen Victoria’s throne. The prince was shot at a welcome event near Sydney by an Irish republican with evidence of mental illness.

The assailant was executed, but the prince lived, saved by the bullet hitting a metal clip of his trouser braces. The attempt set off a new wave of sectarian animosity between Protestants and Catholics, ably stoked by Federation father Henry Parkes. (There was much less fuss after the apparent attempt on the life of then-Prince Charles in Sydney in 1994, though in that case the bullets were blanks.)

In the 1960s, it was war and peace that stirred political passions. Labor leader Arthur Calwell was an opponent of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and it was after a “rowdy........

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