Federal parliament will commence on Monday morning with speeches paying tribute to Helen Haines. It should be a unifying, bipartisan moment for an increasingly febrile, unpleasant political bubble.
Our political representatives talk of turning down temperatures and being kinder, but the challenge is whether they will actually change their own behaviour – not just hector their opponents to do so. Already, we are seeing cracks that the parliamentary kumbaya moment will not last long, and that real contributors to the anger and dislocation present in some parts of Australia may be too hard to fix.
