Yeah, that's the worst. Verbal is just as bad - shit scars for life. The politics and abuse thing is weird in Australia. See, we have two main parties - the 'Liberal' party, who are our right-wing conservative assholes, and the 'Labor' party, who are ostensibly our left wing party born out of union movements (they're now basically centre-right and almost as fashy as the Liberals). Thing is, for us, the working class poor still tend to vote 'left' (i.e. Labor) - my dad always hated the Liberal party and everything it stood for. There's a weird macho 'bloke'-ness to the Labor party that results in abusive pricks all round.