An Australian lawmaker was in critical but stable condition Tuesday after being hit by a car in what authorities said was a deliberate attack, shocking a nation where political violence is extremely rare.
Helen Haines, a 65-year-old independent member of Parliament, was struck Monday by a white Toyota Land Cruiser outside her electoral district office in Wangaratta, a town of about 30,000 people in the southern Australian state of Victoria. She underwent surgery overnight after being airlifted to a hospital in the state capital of Melbourne, about 150 miles away.
Local media reported that one of Haines’ legs had been amputated and that she was fighting to keep her other leg. The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne did not respond to an NBC News request for comment on the reports.
Australian lawmaker loses leg in car ramming attack
Police charged the driver, who they said was a 43-year-old local man, on Tuesday with intentionally causing serious injury, dangerous driving causing serious injury and causing harm to a federal official.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said earlier Tuesday that according to eyewitnesses, the driver had passed Haines and then did a U-turn, hitting her as she was standing by the trunk of her parked car.
“It’s clear that there was a deliberate act here. This wasn’t an accident, someone, you know, just skidding off the road,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp., adding that the motivation was not yet clear.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told the network that witnesses had described seeing the driver reverse and then hit Haines a second time.
The suspect’s father said the family knew Haines well.
She was a “deeply respected, valued and much loved member of our local community,” Brendan Nugent’s father, Rod Nugent, and his partner, Christine Cunningham, said in a statement Tuesday.
“Helen has been our friend for more than 20 years and what happened to her yesterday is devastating and unfathomable,” the statement added.
Political violence is extremely rare in Australia, where lawmakers are often out in public with little or no security and their accessibility is a point of national pride.
“It’s an Australian tradition to have a chat to a politician that you bump into at the shops,” Josh Roose, an associate professor of politics at Deakin University in Melbourne, told NBC News in an interview.
But threats are rising as political rhetoric becomes more extreme, officials and experts say, particularly since the Covid pandemic.
According to the Australian Federal Police, there were 1,067 incidents of threats, harassment, nuisance or offensive behavior against senior officeholders, parliamentarians and protected locations in the 2025-26 financial year, a 12% increase over the previous year and twice the number five years earlier.
In a 2023 study of Victoria state parliamentarians, 82% reported harassment and 85% reported threats of harm, said Josh Holloway, a senior lecturer in government at Flinders University in Adelaide, with female politicians more likely to face abuse.
Holloway said that Australian federal lawmakers, especially those in rural areas, typically work from “shopfront-style offices,” hold regular community meetings and attend local events without security.
Those practices may now come under scrutiny, “but reducing public access to their representatives can come with significant democratic cost,” he said in emailed comments.
Albanese said Tuesday that it was everyone’s responsibility to “turn the temperature down.”
“We can disagree with each other, but do it in a respectful way,” he told Australia’s “Today” show. “And that’s something that Helen Haines always was characterized by, was that respect that she showed to others right across the political spectrum.”
Albanese said later that he had spoken by phone with local barber Ricky Jefferies, who ran from his nearby shop to help detain Haines’ attacker in what Albanese said was “a great example of the Australian spirit.”
“I heard a loud bang, with no brakes. It was crazy,” Jefferies told reporters. “I just ran out the front to see what was happening.”
Jefferies, who said he removed a knife from the suspect’s pocket and pulled him out of the car, said a lot of people “just ran to help.”
Haines, a mother and grandmother who spent three decades working in rural health as a nurse and midwife and has a doctorate in childbirth, was first elected to Parliament in 2019, then re-elected in 2022 and 2025. Her family said in a statement that they were grateful for the “swift assistance of bystanders,” as well as first responders.
The increase in political threats in Australia follows a similar trend in the United States and other liberal democracies, Roose said.
“Australia always echoes what we’re seeing internationally, but sometimes slightly behind,” he said.
Since the pandemic, there has emerged a “level of extremist discourse that is unparalleled in Australian history,” Roose said, one that is highly influenced by politics in the U.S.
Australia, and particularly Victoria, had some of the strictest pandemic lockdowns in the world, which left residents feeling “imprisoned, but also disempowered,” he said.
Lingering feelings of resentment combined with the current high cost of housing, fuel and other necessities have contributed to a “deep hostility” toward the government, Roose said.
Politics in rural Australia, especially, have become “highly inflammatory,” he said, “because of the online space and the poverty and the desperation that, quite frankly, has seeped into these areas.”
Roose said the “paradox” was that the victim was Haines, who is not considered a polarizing figure and is “someone who’s grown up and spent most of their life in these regions.”
“It indicates, I suppose, the challenge facing democracies around the world,” he said.
