What led a 20-year-old nobody shooter to target one of the world’s most polarising politicians and to carelessly kill or injure three of his supporters is almost irrelevant to the global soul searching the incident triggered.

The political context is inescapable and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was not alone in proclaiming it was “an attack on shared values and freedoms”.

President Joe Biden, fighting for his political survival, delivered a rare national address from the Oval Office which – despite his verbal fumbling of the key paragraph – spelled out what is at stake.

“In America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box. You know that’s how we do it, at the ballot box, not with bullets. The power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.”

Earlier Biden claimed such attacks are rare in America and thankfully he’s almost right.

Press Secretary James Brady is placed into an ambulance on March 30, 1981 shortly after John Hinkley’s attempt to assassinate President Reagan in Washington, DC. Photo: Dirck Halstead/Liaison via Getty

Kennedy reminder

The last shooting of a president was Ronald Reagan in 1981 and of a presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. But as Albanese recalled on Monday the Kennedy family also lost another son, President John F Kennedy in 1963.

The Prime Minister’s recollection was no doubt prompted by the fact the dead president’s daughter Caroline is the current United States ambassador to Australia.

The history of the American republic is littered with the assassinations of four presidents and leading public figures like Martin Luther King.

Culture shock

Australia, on the other hand, has suffered only one shooting of a politician since Federation and that was Labor leader Arthur Calwell 58 years ago. He survived with relatively minor injury.

There is no doubt Australia’s stricter gun controls, thanks to John Howard’s reforms in 1996, have led to a significant decrease in gun-related attacks.

But the uniqueness of the Calwell assault points to a very different political culture that pre-dates the response to the precedent-setting Port Arthur massacre.

That of course ignores our bloody history of massacres against First Nations people – something we definitely share in common with the American colonists.

Worrying signs

Although we can take some comfort from our more recent history, Treasurer Jim Chalmers sees worrying signs emerging in Australia and elsewhere in the democratic world.

He noted the emergence of extremism and polarisation as populist leaders seek to leverage advantage from their voters’ grievances and struggles to survive economically.

Chalmers says what we are seeing “with what feels like increasing regularity is the ugliness and the polarisation and the extremism in politics”.

The Treasurer says we can’t let this become the norm in our democratic politics and, like the PM, says we must lower the temperature of our political discourse here.

Chalmers, like Joe Biden in his Oval Office address, nominated the Trump-inspired storming of the US Capitol, the citadel of American democracy, in January 2021 as a worrying resort to violence to settle differences.

The spark for that was Trump’s wilful and wrong insistence that he had been robbed in the election. His supporters – as vox pops at the Pennsylvania rally on the weekend showed – fervently still believe that.

Major differences

Australians can be grateful for three essential differences with the US: We have compulsory, preferential voting and we have an independent Australian Electoral Commission running our general elections.

In the United States there is no uniform federal voting systems and as we saw in the 2000 presidential elections, Florida’s use of indecisive punched card ballots helped George W Bush controversially win the state and the presidency.

Questionable boundaries and voting procedures have been a long-time feature of US elections occasionally creating uncertainty which Trump tried to ruthlessly exploit trashing the very foundation of the democratic process.

Australian voters have the reassurance that their protests at the ballot box will be duly acknowledged, as a defeated prime minister Scott Morrison did in May 2022 when he reflected on “the greatness of our democracy”.

Crossing the line

But Anthony Albanese is worried that threats to MPs and their staff accompanying protests blockading, defacing and in one instance firebombing an electorate office are crossing the line into violence and hateful speech over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Shadow home affairs minister James Paterson singled out the Greens, something the Prime Minister also recently did, accusing them of condoning extremism.

Greens leader Adam Bandt in condemning the Trump assassination attempt said “there is never a justification for violence”.

The Greens reject the conflation of legitimate protest with terrorism. A spokesman says “protesting against a war is hardly condoning violence”.

There will always be robust argument in a healthy democracy like Australia. But as the PM says, the Trump attack “is a moment to reflect on the responsibility we have to maintain our harmony here at home”.

Paul Bongiorno AM is a veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery, with more than 40 years’ experience covering Australian politics