In 2020, the year after she joined parliament, Helen Haines, Dave Sharma and I founded Parliamentary Friends of Cycling. It was fitting to found a friendship group with Helen, somebody who seems to have managed to become friends with another 149 people in this room. I think, like everyone else, I felt I had a special relationship with Helen, but it turns out that all of us had a special relationship with Helen. Stephen Hodge, who helped found the group, described her as warm, intelligent and a highly engaged supporter.

I really enjoyed chatting with Helen about her electorate. My parents had a share and a farm in Yackandandah, known as the biggest little town in north-east Victoria, and Helen shared my admiration for the way in which the town has remade itself as an environmental solar town. She was somebody who was passionate about bringing the issues of her community to the parliament, and I know she engaged extensively with the former coalition government, as she had with our government. She was someone who was always quick to think of others. I messaged her to wish her a happy 65th birthday last month, and she was quick to say that the very best presents were the grandchildren that she was looking forward to meeting.

Helen really epitomises the notion that you can get an awful lot done in politics if you don't care who gets the credit. Phil Haines spoke to us this morning, and he was as warm and expansive as Helen in talking about what she wanted in terms of shaping a kinder and gentler politics. Helen's urged people to donate to Save the Children and sign the civility pledge. I've done both, and I'd encourage others to do the same. She is somebody who is always thinking about others, and I'm, at the moment, thinking of her and the people around her. To Karen Rourke, her chief of staff, thank you for the work that you've done in looking after the team and that you will continue to do in the coming days. Helen's children, Will, Nick and Georgia—I was thinking back to Helen's first speech, where she said to her children:

… you are bold, you are brave, you are loved. Use your talents wisely.

I know that they will be drawing on those wise words of their mum through these extraordinary, challenging times.

I want to finish by saying a little bit about the environments in which this heinous attack took place. We're seeing a rise in anger around the world. An analysis of US congressional speeches found that anger is the highest it's been in 150 years. Last year, verbal and physical attacks on German parliamentarians and candidates for office rose 40 per cent. In a decade, Britain has seen two members of parliament murdered. While some will argue that this might be due to climate or inflation or inequality, I think, if you're trying to explain a big global shift of this scale, you need a big global change. For me, that's the way in which we've gotten our information.

The No. 1 source of information for most people is now social media, and social media uniquely privileges the angry. It is an environment in which posts that go viral tend to be less considered and inquisitive, more outrageous and more divisive. It's an environment where sometimes we can be encouraged to think in zero-sum terms—'the gains for women must come at the expense of men' or 'the gains to the environment must come at the expense of business'—but what we need to remember is that so much of what Australia has created is a positive-sum enterprise. Whether it's creating a beautiful building, organising a festival or playing a sporting match, the best of what we do is what we do together, and the best of our democracy recognises that zero-sum thinking takes us to a poorer, narrower future and that positive-sum thinking is the route to abundance and engagement.

Kindness isn't just a better way of doing politics; it's also a better way of getting the outcomes we care about, so we need to work together to build a kinder, more loving world, to resist the easy temptations of outrage and revenge and to find better ways to care for one another.