Opinion

Columnist, author and academic October 23, 2026 — 5:00am

October 23, 2026 — 5:00am

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.

We are in an age of shouting.…