Vote, Don't Swing: When the Bat Falls on the Wrong Volunteer

Sunday night.

Torquay.

Scorpio Street.

About a quarter to eight.

A 60-year-old One Nation volunteer is at his own home.

Party signs on his property.

Two people, according to One Nation Victoria, are interfering with those signs.

He confronts them.

What happens next is alleged, and the courts will deal with it.

But the picture police and the party have put on the record is not soft.

Victoria Police say a 37-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy were arrested after an alleged assault.

The 60-year-old was taken to hospital with injuries police called non-life-threatening.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, who visited him at University Hospital in Geelong on Tuesday, said he suffered a brain bleed after being knocked unconscious and was in a serious but stable condition.

A photograph supplied by the party showed serious facial injuries.

Hanson said the alleged weapon was a baseball bat.

Allegedly.

Throughout.

The 37-year-old has been charged with assault offences and remanded to appear in court on 10 November.

The 14-year-old was cautioned.

Police have not publicly given a motive.

I am not going to invent one for them.

Warren Pickering, One Nation's Victorian leader, put it in a sentence every Australian kid used to learn before they could spell democracy.

"If you don't like someone's politics, you vote accordingly.

You don't assault them."

That is not a One Nation line.

That is the operating manual for a free country.

Premier Ben Carroll called the incident shocking and said volunteers in every coloured T-shirt deserve to be safe.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson called it absolutely appalling.

Fine.

Correct.

Necessary.

Now hold that thought.

Same week, different microphone

The same news cycle had Anthony Albanese in Antigua and Barbuda for CHOGM, telling world leaders that an alleged attack on independent MP Helen Haines was a warning shot at global democracy.

Helen Haines — the Member for Indi — was hit by a car on 19 October.

She remains in hospital in a serious condition.

Both her legs were amputated.

The alleged attack made global headlines.

Across the spectrum, people called for calmer politics and better protection for elected representatives.

That call was right.

It remains right.

Nothing in this column takes a skerrick away from what she and her family are enduring.

Albanese told Commonwealth leaders that political polarisation is reducing social cohesion and putting pressure on democratic processes.

Threats against elected representatives are increasing, he said, especially against women, and some of those threats have been followed through.

The federal government pledged to fast-track an independent review of safety and security recommendations.

Good.

Do it.

Protect MPs.

Protect candidates.

Protect the people who put their names on ballot papers so the rest of us can argue in public instead of settling things with fists and cars and bats.

But here is the question Canberra would rather you do not ask.

Who gets the press conference?

When the victim is an independent MP from regional Victoria, the Prime Minister takes the story to a room full of world leaders.

Democracy itself is on the charge sheet.

Polarisation.

Social cohesion.

A wake-up call.

When the victim is a 60-year-old One Nation volunteer allegedly beaten on his own property over party signs, we get the standard condemnation package — shocking, appalling, volunteers of every colour — and then the news cycle moves on.

Hanson visits the hospital.

Pickering says the obvious thing.

A crowdfunding page goes up.

The teenager gets what Hanson called a slap on the wrist.

The adult faces court.

I am not ranking pain.

I am not comparing a car attack that cost an MP her legs with an alleged baseball-bat assault that left a volunteer with facial fractures and a brain bleed.

Different facts.

Different gravity.

Different legal questions.

Treating them as a competition would be grotesque, and Helen Haines deserves better than to be used as a prop.

What I am comparing is the volume.

The dial-down-the-rhetoric crowd can find a megaphone when the story flatters their map of who counts as a victim of democracy.

I want to hear the same megaphone when the man in the hospital bed votes One Nation, hands out how-to-votes, and puts yellow-and-black signs on his own front fence.

If political violence is a threat to democracy only when the target is someone the press gallery already likes, then it is not a principle.

It is a vibe.

Signs, pubs, and a climate

This did not land in a vacuum.

On the same Sunday, Meaghers Hotel in Ballarat East and cars outside it were spray-painted with anti-One Nation slogans.

The owner called it mindless stupidity.

He is right.

Mindless, and also a tell.

When you cannot beat an argument, some people reach for a can.

When a can is not enough, some people allegedly reach for a bat.

Victoria's early campaign has already collected uglier souvenirs.

Last month the husband of Liberal candidate Amanda Dow was hospitalised after an alleged assault during a confrontation over election signs.

Emergency Services Minister Paul Edbrooke reported a death threat after a bullet was left on his car bonnet.

Red shirts.

Blue shirts.

Yellow shirts.

Ministerial cars.

Surf Coast fences.

The pattern is not subtle.

Election signs have become contact sport.

Volunteers have become soft targets.

And every time someone treats a corflute as an invitation to a fight, the people who lecture us about "the tone of debate" go strangely selective about whose bruises count as a civic emergency.

Hanson said she did not want to politicise the Torquay attack.

Then she did what politicians do when a volunteer is in a hospital bed: she talked about crime in Victoria and whether Ben Carroll, Jess Wilson, or One Nation would do better.

Fair enough to argue about law and order.

Less fair to let that argument swallow the simpler point.

You do not get to smash a man's face — allegedly — because you hate his how-to-vote.

You do not get to treat a teenager's caution as the whole story while an adult sits on remand for assault charges the courts have not yet tested.

You do not get to wrap yourself in democracy at CHOGM and go quiet when the casualty list includes a One Nation door-knocker from Torquay.

The test nobody wants

Australia's deal is simple.

We fight with ballots.

We argue on talkback.

We abuse each other on social media until the algorithm begs for mercy.

Then we front up on election day and number the boxes.

We do not settle it with baseball bats on Scorpio Street.

If that rule only applies to the parties the ABC can pronounce without wincing, it is not a rule.

It is a preference.

I grew up in western Sydney and I live on the Central Coast now.

I have watched enough local campaigns to know what a volunteer looks like.

They are not strategists.

They are the bloke who takes a Saturday to put signs on his fence because he thinks the country is drifting and nobody in Canberra is listening.

You can think he is wrong about every policy on the sheet.

You can think One Nation is a dead end.

That is what the ballot is for.

What you cannot do — what a free country cannot shrug at — is treat that bloke as fair game because his party is unfashionable in the newsroom.

Lee's beat has always been the two-tier tell: who gets moved on, who gets a vigil, who gets a prime ministerial sermon about democracy, and who gets a polite paragraph on page seven.

Torquay fits the pattern with ugly neatness.

A volunteer on his own property.

Signs damaged, according to his party.

An alleged assault serious enough for a brain bleed and facial fractures.

Charges laid.

A child cautioned.

No public motive from police.

And in the same week, a lecture to the Commonwealth about threats to elected representatives as a warning to democracy itself.

Both stories can be true.

Both deserve air.

Only one of them got the world stage.

So I will ask it cleanly.

Are the people calling for calmer politics as loud when the victim votes One Nation?

Or does the megaphone only come out when the hospital visitor list looks right for the evening bulletin?

If democracy is the point, the answer cannot depend on the party logo on the sign.

Vote.

Don't swing.

Apparently that still needs saying in 2026, on the Surf Coast, in a country that lectures the world about cohesion.

Good luck with the court date.

And good luck to every volunteer still stapling corflutes to star pickets this week — whatever colour the shirt is.

The rest of us can start by meaning it when we say political violence is never acceptable.

All of it.

Not just the convenient half.

And Remember:

Trust no Single Source

Trust Your Gut

and Stay Curious

Lee Robbins

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Images: Torquay Surf Beach, Anthony Albanese CHOGM 2024, Helen Haines portrait, WA election signs — Wikimedia Commons.