Can we call Anthony Albanese a stochastic terrorist, now? One Nation leader Pauline Hanson might agree: she has accused the PM of inciting violence against her, with his speech following Labor’s stunning by-election loss. Certainly, the accusation has merit.
Consider, after all, what stochastic terrorism is defined as: “the repeated use of hate speech or other vilifying, dehumanizing rhetoric by a political leader or other public figure that inspires one or more of the figure’s supporters to commit hate crimes or other acts of violence against a targeted person, group or community”. Note especially that stochastic terrorism doesn’t necessitate a direct incitement to violence: it merely requires the repeated amplification of a message inspiring hate against its target, particularly during a time of heightened political tension.
It’s been bad enough that the PM has either been conspicuously silent on or tacitly condoning the antisemitic rhetoric of the past two years, especially from within his own party. But, says Hanson, the PM and his sidekicks have “crossed a line” by directly targeting her and her party.
The line was crossed on Sunday, at Queensland Labor’s state conference, hours after One Nation’s Luke Herdegen took Secret Harbour – a previously safe Labor seat in WA’s lower house. Albanese, facing a Newspoll that had One Nation on 30 per cent, Labor on 29 and the coalition on a humiliating 19, decided the moment called for a crusade.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has directly accused Anthony Albanese of inciting violence against her by labelling her party “dangerous” and “divisive”.
Senator Hanson told reporters at a press conference in Victoria she received “that many death threats” for her work, which she argued “never happened in a country like this before”.
The party leader was asked whether she thought the prime minister was inciting violence after she accused Mr Albanese, in posts to X on Monday, of fuelling the risk of political violence with his comments about the party.
“Yes, he is,” Senator Hanson replied. “(Mr Albanese) has never called anyone else out as being dangerous and a lot of people are in fear of what they don’t understand.”
This is the same Anthony Albanese who, after the Bondi massacre, informed the nation that “hatred starts with language and then moves to action”. He was talking about other people’s language, of course. Yet, even as the slogans were aimed at Jews, almost the only thing the PM would talk about was so-called ‘Islamophobia’. When the target is Pauline Hanson, he doesn’t even bother pretending: he pours petrol and calls it leadership.
Former ADF Chief David Morrison’s maxim is the one Labor used to recite when it suited them: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” Albanese is not walking past the standard: he is setting it.
The standard is already in the streets and the classrooms. In August, the National Union of Students – the youth wing of the violently far-left Socialist Alternative – organised a national ‘school students’ walkout against Hanson. Undercover footage from Sydney Town Hall captured teenagers and their minders volunteering what they would do if she appeared: shoot her, kill her, send her to the guillotine. Adult marshals in keffiyehs ran the show. A One Nation volunteer at the Ekka was punched, spat on and left with a broken rib the same week. The legacy media walked past.
Then Bendigo. Hours after Treasurer Jim Chalmers joined in the pile-on, and Assistant Minister Matt Thistlethwaite defended the prime minister’s language as merely “telling the truth”, graffiti appeared threatening to kill Hanson, complete with a Minecraft creeper: the little green thing that explodes itself. A parent reported that a year 11 class had spent two periods defacing images of Hanson with slurs, teachers happily helping.
As Hanson rightly says:
The incitement is happening in our educational system and (by) our prime minister, who should know better than that.
That is not civics. That is grooming for the next punch, the next brick, the next unhinged young man who decides the prime minister has already declared the target legitimate.
Hanson also pointed to the murder of Ann Widdecombe in Britain, the former Conservative minister and Reform spokeswoman found dead in a targeted attack, with counter-terrorism police now running the case, as “warning enough about the dangers of poisonous political rhetoric”. Labor’s reply is to keep calling the voters’ choice a danger to the nation.
Thistlethwaite had the chutzpah to thunder that One Nation is “trying to pit one Australian against another”. No: Labor is trying to pit the country against the Australians who just voted it out of a safe seat. Secret Harbour was not a protest vote in the abstract. It was a verdict. Newspoll says the verdict is national.
Albanese says he supports free speech. Hanson’s reply is the only adult sentence in the exchange: free speech is only possible when people are protected from violence for using it. Labor politicians enjoy a free pass to use language they would never tolerate from anyone else. When the prime minister and the treasurer describe a democratically elected party as a threat to the country, some of their more fervent supporters will treat that as an instruction.
The real danger to Jim and Albo, Hanson noted, is not a brick. It is the ballot box. They know it. That is why the language has gone feral. Words have consequences. The prime minister said so himself.
