Hannah Clarke's family tragedy should shut down apologists for unspeakable cruelty

Victorian MP Tim Smith represents wealthy Kew, one of the most reliably conservative electorates in Australia. He thinks living under a democratic centre-left government is – somehow – “suffering”. Two years ago, I laid into Smith when he insisted that a feminist conspiracy was plotting to neuter Thomas the Tank Engine.

His reactionary positions on the weary theme of “political correctness gone mad” are those commonly echoed with far less subtlety among the rightwing social media mob. Smith’s hardly the kind of politician those people denounce as a “feminazi” or a “fag” – and two days ago, the rightwing social media mob denounced Smith as a “feminazi” and a “fag”.

What drew their ire? Conservative Smith’s public sympathy for Queenslander Hannah Clarke and her three children, all murdered by the children’s father. Clarke’s ex had been stalking Hannah; one morning, he climbed into her car and doused her and the children with accelerant. Then he started a fire and leapt out of the car while they all burned to death and he killed himself.

It’s unimaginable to believe anyone, of any political colour, could react to such violent cruelty without sympathy – unless of course, you’ve encountered the crowd of politicised and woman-hating, murine shitheads who typically crust on social media, in which case you believe it all too well.

Related: 'Failure in our system': after Hannah Clarke and her children's murder, experts call for action

That crust has forcibly surfaced – again and again – within Australia’s painful, difficult discussion about the ongoing local epidemic of violence against women and the relationship of that violence to aggressive, simplistic gender stereotypes that yet saturate our culture. They repeat memorised myths designed to foment the “angry dads” of the community into a voting bloc and demobilise any political leadership for cultural change. These myths are: that good blokes “pushed too far” almost haplessly murder their partners (they don’t), that the family court is a feminist cabal that orchestrates cruelty to men (it isn’t) and that men are subjected to female violence at comparable levels as women are by men (they aren’t, not remotely).

The most effective petri dish in which any extremism can be left to flower is political doubt, and so to maintain their numbers, the miscreants keep refreshing it with their lies – even in the wake of a murder so cowardly and callous that it’s registered as something as a “Diana moment” in the Australian public consciousness.

Their desperation results from a discernible public shift in understanding around this murder – a collective realisation that the dangerous masculine stereotype to which the killer conformed had nothing to do with whether he played football or liked beer.

It was that he exposed his extended family to the depths of his woman-hating and treated his partner and kids as his possessions until the moment he chose to destroy them. It seems we are finally grasping, as a society, our responsibility to challenge any cultural suggestion that the performance of force or control against women is somehow “masculinity”.

We know it isn’t, we know we have to do something about it. We have watched too many men seize upon this falsehood and use it to justify the unjustifiable, while women and children die.

And so, among the national grief, Pauline Hanson – family court antagonist and self-appointed champion of “angry dads” – announced that “these things happen”; these “things” being a man premeditating the murder of his family and leaving his ex’s dying body so mutilated by his flames that the only unburnt part of her was the sole of her foot.

“A lot of people are driven to this, to do these acts for one reason or another,” said Hanson, ignoring that Hannah Clarke had actually driven away from her ex, moved to another house, tried – until she died – to extricate herself from his life, even as she tried to negotiate how he could still be a meaningful part of their children’s.

Related: Queensland police detective stood aside over comments about murder of Hannah Clarke and children

It’s not only the dead and the bereaved I feel sorry for. It’s also Detective Inspector Mark Thompson, the police spokesperson on the murder who felt obliged to engage the discourse of apologist nuttery while pleading to be allowed to do his job.

His terrible choice to paraphrase those conversations suggesting “an instance of a husband being driven too far” saw him not only removed from the case but quoted by Bettina Arndt. The not-psychologist and recent recipient of an Order of Australia for trolling feminists played to her fanbase of human crabspawn by praising the quote a distraught Thompson had disowned. Claiming that misogyny makes excuses for male violence was a “feminist script” it would be wise to abandon, quacked Arndt – as a family lay dead and she made excuses for male violence.

It says much about how the death of Hannah Clarke and her children has affected Australians that Arndt’s preemptive victim-blaming was too much even for a feminist bete noire like Tim Smith. What directly brought the internet’s grotesquery upon him was Smith joining the calls for Arndt to be stripped of her honour, a demand to which a number of his conservative peers have since agreed – as has the Australian parliament.

Theatrical culture wars with feminists as papier-mâché villains play very tawdry when a real-life human tragedy takes place.

In the unity of our national sadness, there is a precious, crucial opportunity to repudiate and shut down the propaganda of the Arndts, the Hansons, the internet’s animals and all the apologists for unspeakable cruelty they both feed and feast upon.

We owe it to the children trapped in the burning car, the dying mother begging for someone to save them, to intervene – in any every way we can.

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist