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Treasurer Jim Chalmers has warned about what he calls the “normalisation of extremism” in politics in the wake of the attempted assassination of former United States president Donald Trump at the weekend.
In a round of television and radio interviews this morning to spruik the tax cuts now being delivered in Australians’ tax returns, Chalmers also spoke about the Trump rally in Pennsylvania that injured the former president and left one attendee dead and two others critically injured before the alleged shooter was shot and killed.
We need to be able to disagree in a peaceful way.
We can’t let extremism and polarisation and violence be the norm in our politics. Democracies are supposed to help mend and moderate our differences, not magnify and horrify them. And unfortunately, what we’re seeing with what feels like increasing regularity, is the ugliness and the polarisation and extremism in politics.
There is a role obviously for peaceful protests and looking for consensus in our country doesn’t always mean looking for unanimity – there will always be a range of views. But I think if you look around the world and you look around the democratic world, then you can see that politics is getting uglier, more violent, more polarised in extreme ways, and these are very troubling developments.
We’ve got a big choice to make as democratic societies, we’ve got an opportunity here to step back from the normalisation of that violence, to make sure that we disagree in civil ways and not in violent ways, and that we settle our difference with votes not violence.
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