Cathy McGowan knows better than most how hard it is to build a democracy from the ground up.

For more than a decade, the former independent MP has helped the people of north-east Victoria do something remarkable. They took politics away from the major parties, put it back into the hands of their communities and helped inspire a movement that changed the face of federal parliament.

On Wednesday evening, standing before hundreds of shaken residents in Wodonga, McGowan confronted the possibility that everything they had built was now under threat. Not from a political opponent nor an election defeat, but from violence.

“There is another level of grief, different and deeper from the actual violence, from the sorrow, the shame and the hurt,” she told the crowd. “It’s about Helen in her role as our elected representative – in attacking her, we intuit that this is an attack on our political system, on our democracy.”

For McGowan, the horror was personal.…