The Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll rightly and publicly apologised for the comments. The Queensland detective Mark Thompson who uttered the comments was removed from his position. But the words were spoken: “Is this an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence, and her and her children perishing at the hands of the husband? Or is it an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues that he’s suffered by certain circumstances into committing acts of this form?
To me, and to everyone in my circles, the vile self-indulgent sexist legitmisation of domestic violence and murder that are behind these words was very clear. But we all know, or should know, that this is not the case for a large number of people. The detective did not speak with a sense that he was saying something outrageous. If anything, we can say that he spoke with an extra-ordinary ordinariness. He spoke with the sense of assuredness, legitimacy and reasonableness of a person who knows they are speaking the common sense of many people inside and outside of the police force.
One can guess from past occurrences, that to such people, he will be a ‘good bloke’ who has now been vilified by an establishment captured by politically correct feminists and ‘cultural Marxists’. All what’s left for him is to resign, join a fringe party or run as an independent, and get elected to the Queensland parliament. He can then give a speech about how ‘one is not allowed to say what should go without saying these days’. His mob will shake their head vertically, approving every word he says, while my mob and I will shake our head horizontally asking ourselves yet again: ‘how can it be that we are living in such absurd times?’
I am not qualified, nor do I want, to speak directly to the case of the murder of Hannah Clarke and her children itself. Many people, better-placed and more knowledgeable than me on the question of domestic violence have already written and raised many of the important issues that need to be raised (see the excellent SMH piece by Jenna Price, for example). However, I am interested, more generally, in the figure of the person ‘being driven too far,’ and in the affective community that such a person is part of. I believe that the weight of this affective community has been hovering over, and damaging, our lives for far too long.
The person driven too far does not emerge from nowhere. It is someone who must have already ‘had it up to here’, a state that signals that one is ‘on the brink’. And while the people who are driven too far are a few, the people who have had it up to here are many. They are the community from which the person driven too far emerges. Everyone in this community is ‘fed up,’ but most are successfully working hard to control themselves. The person who is ‘driven too far’ fails to do so but his community understands him.
If I am dwelling on this it is because one cannot fail to note that the figure of the person ‘driven too far’ has also been explicitly or implicitly claimed by the White supremacist murderers that have emerged here and there around the world. And it is very much the case that those murderers emerge from communities that abound with self-righteous feelings of ‘having had it’ and of being ‘fed up’ with migrants, with blacks, with Jews, etc. While we rightly treat those who have been ‘driven too far’ with a great degree of urgency, we take a benign view of those who simply claim to ‘have had it.’ But the organic link between the two is there to see.
As we approach the anniversary of the Christchurch massacre let us not forget this link. For the murderer who has been ‘driven too far’ points straight at the White Australians who form the community of those who are ‘fed up’. These are hardly hard to find. They are represented in our parliament and they are continuously informing us of how ‘fed up’ they are. I simply invite the reader to google ‘Pauline Hanson’ + ‘had it up to here’, or ‘fed up’ and see for themselves. But even more so google ‘Pauline Hanson’ + ‘sick and tired’ and run through the astonishing number of times where Hanson is informing us that she is or ‘Australians’ are on the brink. They’ve had it, they’re sick and tired and they are fed up. Why they are so gives us a good sense of the self-righteous sense of privilege that oozes out of these pronouncements.
From her first day in Parliament Hanson has informed us that she is fed up with Asians. This was well before she declared ‘having it up to here’ with Muslims. I genuinely can quote from her pronouncements all day regarding this. Some stand out. Hanson has declared herself ‘sick and tired’ of ‘the government giving away our money.’ This is when she was opposing scholarships to overseas students. One wonders why isn’t she simply opposed to this. Why does one need to be in a state of near explosion over such a matter? After complaining of the "disgusting" focus on Indigenous culture during the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, she tells us: ‘I've got nothing against the Aboriginals, but I'm sick and tired of being made to feel as if I'm a second-class citizen in my own country’.We’ve been told again and again that we need to respect and understand such poisonous views. There is nothing to respect here. But the white self-indulgence and how it is legitimised definitely need to be understood. It is like a child learning that they can get people to listen if they threaten with throwing a tantrum over not much. In a double dosed statement Hanson has declared that she has ‘had it up to here’ with racial tolerance, while at the same time declaring: ‘I am fed up with people ... calling me a racist.’
We can see in the above the ‘cater for our sensitivity or we will explode’-type of politics that Hanson peddles and which legitimises both her sensitivity and the possibility of exploding. Indeed, another mark of Hanson’s discourse is how the demand to take note of her affective ‘about to explode state’ is accompanied by a formulation such as ‘all I want is…’ where something outrageously offensive and hateful to non-White Australians is often ‘all she wants’: ‘All I ask is that any Australian, regardless of their origin, should give Australia their full and undivided loyalty.’ And ‘All I want is an Australia for Australians’.
Rejecting this politics of emotional blackmail should be part and parcel of the rejection of the justificatory claims embodied in statements such as ‘driven too far’. We need to forcefully assert that just as there is nothing that warrants ‘being driven too far’, there is equally nothing that warrants being ‘fed up’. Let us not forget that the claim that the Christchurch massacre was committed by someone who was driven too far by the effect of Muslim migration was made in Parliament by Fraser Anning. He was condemned just as Mark Thompson was condemned. But the community to whom Anning spoke and who thought that he made sense was not condemned. Indeed, in those two cases, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a major empirical overlap between the two communities. While finding ways to protect us from, and better still avoid the emergence of, the individuals who go too far is crucial and has been underway, the politics of ridding us of the culture of the ‘fed-up’ that generates and legitimises them is yet to begin.
