Helen Haines’ Attack, Sally Rooney & Victoria Secret Runway

Independent MP Helen Haynes has been attacked outside of her electorate office and is currently in a critical condition in hospital.

Now, I want to say at the top of this story, we are recording Tuesday morning.

This will unfold rapidly.

By the time you're hearing this, we believe there will be new information.

You might be listening to this three days late.

There might be an entire different media conversation happening.

So we just want to timestamp where we're at now and say that we can only speak to what we understand of what's happened so far.

At around 3.30pm on Monday afternoon, emergency services attended to Helen Haynes' electorate office in the regional Victorian town of Wangaratta.

Now, what we know so far is that a 43-year-old man had struck Haynes with his white Toyota Land Cruiser.

He was detained by a civilian at the scene and was then subsequently arrested by police.

We also know that a knife was located in his vehicle by police.

During an interview last night on ABC 730, because we know that this, again, emerged in initial reports by about 5pm, we were discussing this in the group chat before the nightly news to say we think something serious is emerging here.

By the sort of nightly news and by ABC 730, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed that the attack was not an accident.

He also confirmed that Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police and ASIO were all part of a joint investigation into what has happened here and that counter-terrorism forces had been engaged as part of that investigation.

Now, I want to be really clear.

We don't know yet and we haven't confirmed yet.

Just because counter-terrorism is part of this investigation does not confirm it's a terrorist attack.

What it means is that investigations are underway and that they are raising the alarm and that the threshold is across all agencies there, which is a really important thing to do and is the right decision at this stage.

Can we talk about who Helen Haynes is? Please, I would love to.

A lot of people who don't follow politics closely probably don't know who Helen Haynes is.

She's one of those people that was one of the sort of original independents who She was actually the first person ever in Australian politics to be an independent that succeeds another independent in their seat.

So Helen Haynes is elected in 2019 to the seat of Indi in regional Victoria.

It's one of the biggest electorates in the country.

It spans a large regional area of northern Victoria.

Now, Helen Haynes was a nurse, was a midwife.