They came at dawn on Anzac Day, to mock a commemoration sacred to many Australians, and particularly to reject the idea of being welcomed to this country.

If you have experience of political meetings, you should be familiar with this particular variety of disruption: a person who stands up to tell everyone that they don’t understand what’s really going on and demands that everyone confronts the grim reality they have uncovered.

In the old days these people might have talked about the “false consciousness” of their audience, borrowing from Marx; today they are more likely to say that they have been “red-pilled”, in a turn of phrase from The Matrix.

Anzac Day dawn service at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.Credit: Simon Schluter

But in recent years at council meetings, and again during this election campaign, this kind of disruption has taken a troubling turn. The person who aggressively insists that a meeting about public broadcasting at a library or about refugees at a church should turn its attention to the “real issue” – what stealing a corflute means for political integrity; the “correlation” between immigration and crime – is accompanied by a camera and sometimes a crew.

Instead of a plea to be heard, their presence becomes performative; it is about feeding the self-righteous rage of another audience, online.

The consequences for a democracy in which opportunities for open exchange........

© The Sydney Morning Herald