Helen, you're so important to us, you are so admired by us and you are so loved. I want to say to you, Mr Speaker, to the Prime Minister and to all of the speakers so far and for the rest of the day that we're very grateful for this opportunity to say a few words in support of Helen as she recovers from her injuries. This is an opportunity as well to convey to Phil, who we spoke to this morning, to their family and friends, to the staff doing a wonderful job and to that beautiful country community the immense grief that we all share and to wrap our arms around each other in a spirit of solidarity today. I also want to say thank you to the first responders, the community members and everyone who stepped up and stepped in on that devastating Monday on the main drag of Wangaratta.

This parliament's a rugged place to work. Ours can be a brutal profession, and sometimes it takes a lot for us to agree, but today shows that we are capable of that. It's rarer now that we come together like this, and that makes it more significant. In my time here, there's never been more unanimity in this place than in this moment in support of Helen Haines, and that's because Helen is more than one of us. She is more than a colleague. She's more than an acquaintance. She's not just making up the numbers. She's not some kind of numerical afterthought. She is, as her colleagues on the crossbench have described her, the best of us.

It's not lost on any of us that arguably the most rational member of this place has become a victim of the most irrational violence. Helen's is closest to a perfect temperament in a very imperfect place. A couple of hundred years ago, Wordsworth wrote a poem called 'Resolution and independence'. In it, he wrote of something called a 'peculiar grace' in the face of despondency. Helen has, I think, a 'peculiar grace'. She's got the best voice in politics. It's not just the sound of it but the weight of it—the weight that it carries not just in its tone and its tenor but in its authenticity and its authority as well. Those of us with nurses or midwives in our family recognise it well and recognise it immediately—that bearing which is warm, practical, pragmatic, compassionate and very positive, even in the face of great difficulty. On those days when Helen would come round for a cup of tea or I'd run into her on the way into work, the positivity and optimism from that time that we would spend together would sustain me for the rest of the day—such was her impact on all of us.

There's an investigation underway, of course. We'll get to the bottom of what happened here. It's never about one thing on its own, but a pattern had formed even before the madness of last week. There was an inevitability of this tragedy that makes it shocking but not surprising. It is not free of a threatening context. Politics has taken a perilous turn. Public life is more dangerous now. Rhetoric is more violent. Threats are more frequent. There's more than one cause of this, but monetised violence online is not helping—that algorithmic rage bait that's all about preying on the nation's challenges and not solving them.

There is so much of this that is cruel, but one part of that is that the more available you are to your constituents, the more vulnerable you are. There is a lot about our democracy which is better than elsewhere, but we can't import the divisive politics of other countries without importing the violent consequences as well. That violence that we see from time to time on the streets of France or the United States is not as far away from the main drag of Wangaratta as we may have assumed or may have wanted. It's closer than we would like.

Speaker, as you said in your beautiful contribution, we look forward to the day we see and hear Helen again here in the people's house. But, in the meantime—and after that—it is up to all of us and it is up to every single Australian to decide whether this dangerous fraying becomes an unravelling or an awakening and whether this moment makes Helen's grace more or less peculiar.