No matter how serious the issue, nuance becomes a thought crime for the Coalition’s court jesters

On a Thursday in early July 2019, a rookie Liberal MP rose to her feet in the House of Representatives to give her first speech. With Scott Morrison watching on, Bridget Archer introduced herself to a national audience. She spoke about her love for northern Tasmania, her ambition to be a “genuine and authentic” representative for her constituents. She shared her pride in being the first Liberal woman to hold the seat of Bass. After those pleasantries, Archer arrived at the most challenging section of her opening sortie.

“Those who know me will attest that I am far more interested in hearing other people’s stories than in telling my own,” the new MP told the House of Representatives. “I think, in large part, it is because I find my own childhood story painful and difficult to tell – and never more so than today in this place.” Archer said she had experienced “childhood trauma.” Having survived it, helping others survive it would be a “priority” during her time in federal politics.

We can be a bit more specific than “trauma.”

Archer is a survivor of child sexual abuse.

Sexual abuse in childhood is associated with a number of mental health challenges, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders and suicidal ideation. Archer told her new colleagues she had struggled, as an adult “to find my way in the world, and indeed, my place in it”. But she sought help and developed “better ways to cope, to build resilience and strength”.

The member for Bass, Bridget Archer. Photograph: Mike Bowers/Guardian Australia

Archer said Australia must do more “to keep our children and families safe.”

This week in parliament, in her capacity as co-chair of the Parliamentary Friends of Ending Violence Against Women, Archer hosted a briefing for MPs about services provided by frontline groups to try to prevent sexual violence, including in Indigenous communities. She’s organised a number of similar events during her time in Canberra.

On Thursday morning, Liberal and National MPs were summoned to the House of Representatives to support the Liberal leader, Peter Dutton. Dutton intended to move a suspension of the standing orders to demand that parliament back his call for a royal commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities, as well as an audit of government spending on Indigenous Australians.

Isn’t a survivor entitled to express her view? In what universe is that unreasonable?

These policy positions – championed by Dutton and the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price during the voice to parliament referendum – have possibly been endorsed by the shadow cabinet. But Coalition MPs say they were never debated in the party room.

As Thursday’s suspension debate unfolded, Archer knew she couldn’t sanction a royal commission that would only examine child abuse in Indigenous communities.

As she told me after crossing the floor to protest Dutton’s race-specific motion, child sexual abuse happens in institutions, in families, right around the country. All races. All ethnic groups. Rich and poor. Her point was simple. If you want to stand up for children, stand up for all children. Don’t inflict another inquiry on traumatised people. Do something about it. Resource the frontline services, the professionals with the expertise. Stop talking. Start acting.

The point of me connecting two Thursdays in Archer’s career – the Thursday in 2019 when she shared her truth, and Thursday of the current sitting week when she crossed the floor – is to explain child sexual abuse isn’t an abstraction for Archer.

This is real life, real pain, etched deep. Given that, given she’s been to hell and survived, nobody has the right to tell this woman how she should or should not feel, or what she should or should not do, about this issue.

If her colleagues had any brains, they might engage and listen to the survivor in their midst before braying like combatants in a cage fight. But the braying on all fronts was dialled up to 11 this week. There was no issue too serious to weaponise.

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It wasn’t just in the chamber. As sometimes happens in the bro-zone of 2GB, things got hysterical. Dutton’s mate Ray Hadley wanted to know how long the leader was going to tolerate … (wait for it) … independent thinking. “How long are you going to put up with Bridget Archer? She’s crossed the floor to support Labor on housing, on emissions reduction, and a censure motion against the former prime minister, and now, embarrassingly, she’s voted with the government on something I think the vast majority of Australians want to see happen. And she’s still a member of the Liberal party!”

Given Archer’s life experiences, Dutton should have told Hadley to take a very deep breath. To his credit, Dutton did remind the shock jock that Liberals have the right to cross the floor “if that’s where your conscience takes you”.

But things went downhill from there. He indicated he’d have a private chat with Archer because she’d made a “mistake” voting with Anthony Albanese. This was the “wrong decision.”

So we’ve reached the crux of the thing. Dutton believes he has a valid perspective on the problem of child sexual abuse because he’s a former cop. Fair enough. But doesn’t a person who has actually survived child abuse have moral and practical authority as well? Isn’t a survivor entitled to express her view? In what universe is that unreasonable, or (to quote Dutton) “wrong”?

I’ll tell you what universe. In the absolutely arse-about universe.

While serious people were preoccupied with war crimes, less serious people were hunting down alleged thought crimes

Things got worse. Archer was deluged with abuse. Keyboard warriors, high on the mission of letting no good deed go unpunished, came out in force, hissing in the inbox, on social media platforms.

The survivor found herself cast as an apologist for child sexual abusers.

This was not just bad. Disgraceful, more like.

This wasn’t the only depressing episode that had me actively suppressing the urge to shout “get a grip” from my ringside position. The Israel-Palestine conflict was a similar soul-shaking rollercoaster. Hall monitors ran around with rulers measuring two degrees of difference; there were bellicose responses to anything that wasn’t group think.

Given things are a bit off the rails, let’s all take a breath, and be clear what the conflict in the Middle East is.

It is a test of humanity. It’s not a test of the talking points. It’s not an arena to inject a bit of opportunistic tone policing. This is self-evidently and observably life and death.

When Hamas militants swarmed into Israel a couple of weeks ago killing, raping and kidnapping innocents, barbarism triumphed over humanity. The questions were immediate and obvious. Could Israel maintain its humanity in the face of that terrible provocation? Could it assert its absolute right to self-defence while acting within the rules of war?

That’s the actual conversation.

Serious people are worried about the risks of conflagration. War crimes by barbarous militants. Shock-and-awe military responses that imperil civilians; the spectre of collective punishment – conduct which is prohibited by international law.

A conflagration during the coming days, if that’s where this goes, will inflame diaspora communities around the world and send another shudder through the global economy at a time when many people are already struggling to make ends meet. Things are fraught enough for the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation to worry publicly about the risks of opportunistic violence in this country.

A couple of Labor frontbenchers offered measured thoughts. Ed Husic and Anne Aly expressed concern that innocent Palestinians were facing retribution for the unspeakable crimes of Hamas.

Anthony Albanese condemns ‘slaughter of innocent people’ by Hamas – video

Responding to Husic and Aly, Liberal Sussan Ley (once a prominent member of the Australian parliament’s friends of Palestine group, once a parliamentarian who championed Palestinian statehood), promptly declared that Labor was afflicted by “deep division” and “confusion”. Ley thought the expression of these sentiments was a test for Albanese.

A test of what, exactly? The orthodoxy in liberal democracies like Australia used to be war crimes are bad, regardless of where they happen, regardless of who commits them. Has that orthodoxy shifted? Boy, I hope not.

It doesn’t appear to have shifted. Parliament on Monday passed a motion noting innocent civilians on “all sides” were suffering, supporting international efforts to allow humanitarian access into Gaza and calling for the “observance of international law” and the “protection of civilian lives.”

While serious people were preoccupied with war crimes, less serious people were hunting down alleged thought crimes.

Specifically, the crime of nuance. The crime of being able to hold all the complexity of human beings and their history in your head. The crime of caring about the suffering of innocents, where ever it happens, in whatever context. Politicians have a choice. They can respond to the gravity of the times by behaving like court jesters. Or they can get about the business of listening, reflecting and connecting.