My dad was PM once or twice. Somewhere along the way a politician’s job changed dramatically

The kids of politicians are often asked if they’ve considered the same path as their parents. Some of us have. It’s a consideration coloured by lived experience, good and bad. The warmth and purpose of public service are difficult to separate from its uglier realities: rage, vitriol, abuse – and sometimes violence.

“I don’t know how your old man does it,” people would say to me when Dad had an office in the same building as Helen Haines. “You must be so proud.” But when they don’t know they’re in the company of a politician’s kid, their barbecue throwaway lines are much different. “As if you’d choose to be away from your family like that.” “You’d have to be crazy to put yourself out there like that, wouldn’t you?” “I guess it’s part and parcel of public life.” “It takes a certain kind of person …”

A certain kind of person. What is that kind of person?

Representative democracy rests on a beautifully simple proposition. Communities choose people to advocate for them in the places where decisions are made. Those advocates carry with them the needs, hopes, frustrations and ambitions of the people who sent them.

For representation to work, we need our parliamentarians to be able to connect with community. They need a ready, patient ear. They need empathy and to be open to different experiences and perspectives. They must balance competing needs against domestic, economic and geopolitical realities, and explain their decisions with respect and patience.

And then, if it turns out that kind of person hasn’t earned the confidence of their community, we can replace them. That’s the extraordinary promise of our system. We don’t have to like our politicians or agree with them. We should question, probe and challenge. We can be blunt, put a counter-view, campaign against them or simply vote them out.

But somewhere along the way we’ve begun to confuse the right to hold politicians accountable with carte blanche to make their lives unbearable. To send them hundreds of hateful messages and emails. To scream abuse at them out the car window as they host a community gathering on a quiet suburban street. To force them to glance over their shoulder as they put something in the boot of their car in case someone’s ready to ram them – whatever the reason or motivation.

A beloved wife, mother and grandmother in hospital, having lost both legs and fighting for her life after an attack in the community she represents, is not something we should accept as part and parcel of public life. In any other workplace, repeated threats, harassment and intimidation would be recognised by those responsible for governance as serious psychosocial safety risks requiring action. Yet we seem to accept that the very people responsible for making these laws should absorb those same risks as part of the vocation.

MPs cannot simply put a barrier between themselves and the people who threaten them: their job depends on being accessible to the public. The very openness we demand of them is what makes them vulnerable. If we make the price of political service the willingness to endure hatred, we risk selecting our representatives not for their capacity to serve, but for their capacity to survive.

That’s a different ask, isn’t it? We’re no longer looking for an empath, we’re looking for a warrior.

Democracy is precious. We should want a great many kinds of people to choose a path to its epicentre. Not just the unusually brave or the extraordinarily ambitious, the thick-skinned or the protected. We should want decent, loving, thoughtful and capable humans like Helen Haines. We should want people who are unsure sometimes and connected enough to their communities to understand the nuanced needs they represent.

And we should want them to be able to remain those people once they’re elected. Because if the only people willing to enter parliament are those who can withstand everything we throw at them, we may find ourselves represented by people who have learned not to feel very much at all.

Jessica Rudd is a non-executive director, an entrepreneur and a writer. Her father was prime minister once or twice.

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