The attack on Helen Haines has sharpened concern about political violence. Regulating platforms and policing threats matter, but prevention also means giving young people institutions where they feel they belong and matter.
The attack on Helen Haines outside her Wangaratta electorate office has shaken a country that likes to believe political violence happens somewhere else. Ms Haines has survived, but at terrible cost; her recovery will be long. What drove the man arrested is a matter for police and the courts. We should resist filling that gap with explanations that happen to suit our existing convictions, and nothing here attempts that. But the questions the attack has sharpened, about why political hostility is rising and why young Australians seem increasingly exposed to it, were being asked well before it happened.
Our security agencies have been warning for some time. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) says one in five of its priority counter-terrorism cases now involve young people. Its director-general, Mike Burgess, has described the internet as “the single most potent and powerful incubator of extremism”. Threats against those in authority are rising too: the Australian Federal Police recorded 1,067 reports of violent threats against high-office holders in 2025–26, up from 951 the year before.
The national response has followed that diagnosis. Age limits on social media, pressure on platforms to change their algorithms, counter-terrorism policing and early disruption are all aimed at what draws young people towards hatred. They are necessary. But those who study radicalisation speak of two kinds of drivers: pull factors, which attract people to extremist movements, and push factors, which make people receptive in the first place. On the pull, we have a vigorous public debate. On the push, we are close to silent.
Two teenagers can be served the same feed of grievance and contempt. One scrolls past; the other is captured. The psychologist Arie Kruglanski’s ‘significance quest‘ theory offers the best-developed explanation. People become most susceptible when they have lost a sense of mattering, through humiliation, exclusion or repeated failure, and are then offered a story and a group that promise to restore it. Research has found that loss of social significance strongly predicts ideologically motivated crime and participation in violent extremism. The algorithm is the recruiter. Humiliation and exclusion prepare the recruit.
This is where schools enter the argument. Outside the family, the school is where most young Australians spend most of their waking hours for 13 years. It is where they are known or not known, where failure is repaired or compounded, and where they learn whether an institution will treat them as people who matter. Students who feel connected to their school become less violent over time, and connectedness can partly make up for thin support at home. But its protective effect weakens as deprivation deepens. The children who most need what a school can offer are the ones whose schools must do the most to offer it.
Belonging alone is not the answer. Extremist groups offer belonging too, often very powerfully. What a good school offers is a different kind, in which a young person can feel: I have a place here; I can contribute; I can disagree; and other people have those rights too. That is the belonging a democracy depends on, and it is the one extremist movements cannot provide.
Across more than four decades in public education, including work with students with severe behavioural difficulties, I saw how much the school environment could matter. Some students arrived expecting hostility, and their behaviour made relationships hard and classrooms unsafe. What changed them was never reassurance alone, and never punishment alone. It was clear expectations, predictable structure, and adults who could hold a boundary without turning every failure into a verdict on the child’s worth. That work takes skilled people and time. It cannot be done on the goodwill of exhausted staff.
I want to be careful about what this argument claims. Schools do not cause extremism, and better schools will not abolish it. The evidence linking school connectedness to reduced violence is strong; the evidence specific to violent extremism is thinner and still developing. Most young people who feel excluded never go near political violence. The claim is narrower: schools are one of the very few places where push factors can be reduced across a whole population, and across a whole population, small reductions matter.
Schools are also where children first meet institutional authority. Whether rules are applied fairly, whether a student is heard before a decision is made about them, and whether exclusion is a last resort or a reflex are a young person’s first lessons in whether institutions can be trusted.
Those lessons are hardest to teach well when schools are stretched. Staff shortages mean classes are covered, merged or taught out of field. Counsellors carry caseloads that leave little room for relationship. Suspension becomes the default response to behaviour that needed time the school did not have. In residualised schools, where need is most concentrated, every one of these pressures is sharpest. Each is a small institutional loss of significance. Some students absorb them. Others accumulate them. And under the current funding agreement, NSW public schools are not due to reach the full Schooling Resource Standard until 2034, 23 years after the Gonski review said they should.
None of this requires schools to become arms of counter-terrorism. Turning teachers into informants would destroy the trust that makes schools protective. What it requires is that governments count schools as prevention infrastructure and fund them accordingly: counselling staff where need is greatest, conditions that let teachers stay long enough to know their students, and alternatives to exclusion that keep young people attached.
That is a revenue question. Australia collects around 30 per cent of GDP in tax, well below the OECD average of about 34 per cent. The May budget showed that tax settings can change when a government decides a cause is worth it: negative gearing and the capital gains discount were reformed in the name of first home buyers. Some will say the problem is efficiency, not money. Some spending is certainly wasted, but no one can make efficient a counsellor who was never hired.
In the days since the attack, leaders from every part of the political spectrum have spoken with obvious and genuine distress. I do not doubt it. But grief is not a policy, and this is a testing time. If the response is more security for politicians and nothing for the institutions that hold young people in place, the condolences of this month will have been, in the most literal sense, cheap. There is more at stake than consistency. Research by the criminologist Kristina Murphy has found that people’s sense that government is fair and means what it says is protective: those who see institutions as legitimate are less angry and less drawn to violence. A political class that mourns the consequences of social neglect while declining to fund its repair would be guilty of hypocrisy on a monumental scale, and would be feeding the very distrust it fears.
Regulating platforms deals with what pulls young people towards hatred. Schools are where we decide whether they have somewhere else to stand. We will soon learn whether genuine grief can be translated into budgets.
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.