LATIKA M BOURKE Pauline Hanson said sorry for things done in her name — why didn’t Anthony Albanese?

Labor MPs should be worried. Very worried.

After another national tragedy, the Prime Minister has tangled himself in a blubber of spin, denials and gaslighting, and what’s more, managed to cede the moral high ground to One Nation, who used the shocking attack on Helen Haines to immediately apologise for their grubby cartoon which mocked federal Senator Jacqui Lambie’s vaginal prolapse.

Once again, the nation is traumatised. The unspeakable has happened. Political violence, a toxin that was once thought to belong in basket-case America and polarised Brexit Britain, has entered the Australian bloodstream.

After Bondi, it is a double shock that the nation’s relative innocence is no longer one of its defining characteristics. The poison that pervades social dysfunction and bitter political debate abroad has arrived onshore and could become a permanent feature.

The triple-traumatising factor is the target — grey-haired, bespectacled, softly but firmly spoken 65-year-old Helen Haines, who, as the Member for Indi, built a reputation for representing her community and the broader Teal ideal of integrity in public life.

To think that her non-confrontational way of politics could expose her to the horrific violence that has shattered her way of life forever, losing both her legs, is as unfathomable as it is distressing.

Just like Peter Andren, the late Member for Calare, a pioneering and rare country independent who sat in the House of Representatives in the early 2000s, her brand of regional independent came with a streak of pastoral care, and the electorally appealing factor of being seen to be above the two-party politics that so many Australians are sick of due to the tribalism and party-first mentality it involves.

That is why, when she recently shone a light on a $6 million Federal Government grant distributed to a golf club in Anthony Albanese’s inner-Sydney electorate of Marrickville, it was so devastating for the Prime Minister.

It is very easy for the Labor Party to dismiss criticism of its spending record and priorities when it comes from the beleaguered Liberal Party or anger-driven One Nation.

It is nearly impossible to bat it away when the critique comes from someone who looks like your favourite aunt — the one who carries zero family baggage.

And there is plenty of reason for Helen Haines to have applied her integrity lens to the Prime Minister. At the heart of her interrogations is whether Labor deliberately pork-barrelled the bulk of a $561 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure grants program to its own electorates for election time.

Faced with legitimate questions, the response from the Prime Minister, via his office, was true to form — they went on the attack, distributing to journalists in the Canberra press gallery a five-page dossier they prepared, questioning Helen Haines’ right to query the public spending.

According to metadata, the dirt sheet was authored by one of the Prime Minister’s most senior communications advisors — Joshua Lloyd.

Whether he initiated the file or it was directed from above him is something he and the Prime Minister’s chief advisors will not answer. But Labor MPs should be inquiring, because it goes to the political culture that the Prime Minister sets.

Helen Haines’ fault, according to this document, was that she had fought for nearly $2 billion in funding for her regional electorate.

But that is precisely her job as a backbencher and local MP and is hardly tantamount to the question the Government faces, which is: did it use its governing position to dole out funds to Labor electorates in order to shore up votes in the 2025 election?

Ms Haines can only seek Government approval for funding, as unlike Labor, she is not in power and does not have the ability to distribute funds and time their announcement for re-election.

Her quest to hold Labor accountable is a shining example of the value and power of an independent MP, who is willing to hold the executive to account.

Imagine if Government backbenchers took it to the executive as they do in the UK and a long time ago in the United States? Voters might have a higher trust in their democracy.

The notion of prime ministerial staffers drawing up a dirt sheet to secretly distribute to journalists in the hope that they would write up Labor’s attack as unbiased news was, as fellow crossbencher Monique Ryan put it, laughable.

In becoming the first public official to confirm the attack on Ms Haines, Mr Albanese praised her “integrity.” When later asked about how this dirty dossier prepared by his personal staff accorded with that statement, he defaulted to his robotic mode of bluster, denial and gaslighting.

“It’s a list of funding asks from Helen Haines, just showing that people of integrity stand up for their electorate. No personal criticism of Helen. Helen is a strong advocate for her electorate. She’s advocated for funding for projects in her electorate,” Mr Albanese told the ABC’s Hamish MacDonald on Sydney radio on Thursday.

If this is to be believed, why did the dirt sheet include quotes of Ms Haines, rightly calling for “greater transparency about how funding decisions are made against selection criteria” and again, correctly identifying that “Australians are increasingly fed up with a self-serving political establishment, and pork barrelling only further undermines trust in government and our democracy?”

Mr Albanese knows better than anyone that these documents are regularly put out by the governments and oppositions of the day and are colloquially known as “s..t sheets.”

Anyone who has spent two minutes in Canberra knows what they are and why taxes are paid on staff to draw them up and why they are distributed to the press.

If the Prime Minister, who has spent nearly half of his 63 years in the Federal Parliament, was honestly trying to say that Ms Haines stood for integrity by seeking funding for her electorate, why didn’t he simply issue a press release under his name saying so instead of getting his staff to distribute an anonymous document?

As usual, he showed his reflexive instinct is to get tricky whenever his conduct is questioned. And he offends the common decency of Australians once more with his failure to simply say, we got that one wrong and given how hot the political temperature is and the swift radicalisation that can occur in our social media age, I’m happy to cop this one and say “I’m sorry.”

After Bondi, his absurd denials over referring to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s melons and insisting to the public that his promises, made 50 times, not to touch negative gearing and capital gains taxes, Labor MPs must surely be starting to ask themselves what the Prime Minister’s frayed relationship with truth says about his leadership qualifications.

Mr Albanese is a proven, successful, election-winning politician, but his moral authority to lead a nation that worries the country is breaking down every which way they look, is fast dissolving.

And what should worry Labor MPs most is that this is yet another unforced error from the Prime Minister and again at a time when he could have risen to the occasion and proven his growing pile of critics wrong by displaying the humanity, emotional intelligence, warmth and self-awareness a shell-shocked nation craves.

As disaffected voters look elsewhere, it should alarm Labor MPs that the one person who raced to say sorry for their role in stoking division and personal attacks this week was Pauline Hanson.

One Nation created and distributed a nasty and unkind cartoon that mocked Independent Senator Jacqui Lambie’s vaginal prolapse.

No one needs their medical history being made national fodder, however effective this brutally personal approach has been for Ms Hanson’s political inspiration — US President Donald Trump.

Americans might be willing to be that mean to each other in public, but Australians are innately guided by their sense of fair go and common decency. Punching down is a dog act.

When confronted, Ms Hanson initially told Senator Lambie to “lighten up” and “get over it”.

But clearly shocked by what had happened to Helen Haines, and before it was known if the alleged attacker signed up to her brand of politics or far-left ideology, she apologised.

“The video went up without my actually seeing it, and I was not aware of the content of the video,” Senator Hanson told News24 on Monday.

“I have spoken to the creator of that video. I’ve asked him to actually change it. I respect people’s views and opinions out there, and it wasn’t as tastefully done as it could have been.

“I do apologise for that. And I’ve already spoken to them about it and changing that.”

Hanson will have been relieved that the alleged attacker Brendan Nugent shared extremist left rather than extremist right content on social media.

But her pre-emptive move and unequivocal apology means that the record will show that the leader of a party Mr Albanese regularly derides as divisive and nasty showed better judgment and contrition compared to the Prime Minister, the leader of the party of Government.

Mr Albanese is sensitive to criticism and holds vengeful grudges against those who question his style. But it may be time for the caucus to deliver him some well-meaning feedback and for the Prime Minister to stop taking it out on the messenger.