Andrews is right — we’re sliding toward a more violent, extreme US political culture

A second candidate calling for the murder of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews; a Victorian Liberal candidate making misogynist, racist comments; another revealed to be the speartip of a concerted (and seemingly successful) campaign by religious extremists to infiltrate the Victorian Liberal Party — the Victorian election is increasingly resembling the removal of a bandage from a festering sore.

Crikey readers will fall over themselves with surprise, but Andrews is right in his response to Legislative Councillor Catherine Cumming’s reference to turning Andrews into “red mist”, that this represents the Americanisation of Australian politics — or more accurately another stage in that process.

A Liberal candidate has already called for Andrews to face justice for murder — and retained his Liberal endorsement. The Liberals are preferencing a candidate who called for the murder of Andrews ahead of Labor. As Crikey’s Cam Wilson reported, a Liberal candidate is spreading “Big Lie”-style claims designed to undermine perceptions of the integrity of the election. And the Liberal Party has already tried to spread conspiracy theories about Andrews.

Each of these — violent rhetoric, religious extremism, misogyny, racism, claims political opponents are criminals, attempts to undermine the legitimacy of elections, conspiracy theories — can be checked off against a list of Republican tactics in the US in the age of Trump.

It’s unsurprising in the sense that right-wing extremism in Australia is very heavily derivative of US extremism, and readily borrows its tactics, ideas and slogans.

While the Victorian Liberal Party is the centre of this shift towards a far more extreme and dangerous political environment, it is only going where other branches of the Coalition have gone before it.

Those with long memories will recall that a key issue that caused problems for the Howard government was preferencing One Nation, with John Howard happy to allow Pauline Hanson and her candidates to be preferenced ahead of Labor and other senior Liberals, who regarded her racism as beyond the pale, wanting her to be put last in all circumstances. Eventually Howard had to succumb to more moderate opinion.

In recent years, the Nationals simply abandoned that policy and began preferencing One Nation ahead of Labor — even after Hanson and her apparatchiks were revealed to have sought US help to undermine Australia’s gun laws. It took that scandal to force Scott Morrison in 2019 to announce One Nation would be preferenced below Labor by the Liberals. But in this year’s election, the LNP in Queensland put One Nation ahead of Labor in most electorates.

That all occurred with minimal outrage from the media — Howard must have wondered why he copped so much heat for something the press gallery mostly now ignores.

The Nationals and the LNP’s treatment of Hanson was another step in the normalisation of right-wing extremism in Australian politics — by which blatant racism was no longer seen as a disqualifying feature for participation in political life. It’s little wonder that a young Victorian Liberal candidate should attack Indigenous peoples and call for nuclear waste to be dumped in Alice Springs — such views are little different to those espoused by parties preferenced by the Nationals and the LNP.

And despite the efforts of candidates guilty of urging the murder of Andrews to crabwalk away from their comments, such rhetoric has real consequences. The more that violent rhetoric is given a platform, the more people it reaches. And the more people it reaches, the more statistically likely an individual is to be motivated to engage in violence.

Urge the killing of a politician often enough, loud enough and with enough amplification, and eventually the message will reach someone at risk of acting on it. And if it comes from a mainstream, legitimate source — a Liberal Party candidate, for example, or a serving politician — that increases the odds still further.

That’s exactly what’s happened in the US as political violence and violent assaults on synagogues, mosques, LGBTIQA+ people and women have ramped up as Republicans regularly use violent rhetoric and right-wing media like Fox News try to shift blame and play down violence.

This is not something turned around easily or quickly. Especially not if one of the principal vectors of it, the Victorian Liberals, do nothing.