Albo's old home was down the road a few blocks from where I lived - if you could call it "living" back then.

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Pyrmont Bridge Road was a noisy, polluted thoroughfare, an artery clogged around the clock with belching trucks making their way to and from Darling Harbour, then a working goods yard. Competing for olfactory attention with the diesel smoke was the old biscuit factory and the kerosene smell of aircraft descending into Kingsford Smith Airport. You could almost taste the lead on your tongue.

Long before it was gentrified, it was the sort of neighbourhood you lived in by necessity, certainly not choice. The city's ripped backside, to purloin a lyric from Iggy Pop's "The Passenger": a place from which you plotted escape every day you endured it.

As a brand-new cadet journalist in the early 1980s, earning very little, I longed for the day I could afford to leave Pyrmont Bridge Road and the squalid terrace I shared with a group of similarly inclined young people.

My discomfort was only fleeting. A couple of years of urban hardship until I had the means to live more comfortably - a useful dose of reality after a comfortable if crushingly boring upbringing in Canberra.

For Anthony Albanese and his single mother, Maryanne, in that home on Pyrmont Bridge Road, the experience was defining, a log-cabin story retold countless times in a long political career. Crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, there was no escape for Maryanne, who got by on a disability pension until she died in 2002 at 65. She was cared for by her son while he studied at university.

Whatever you might think of the PM's performance or character, there's something off about targeting his late mother for the circumstances in which she found herself raising her son. But we shouldn't be surprised by Pauline Hanson's comments on Karl Stefanovic's old podcast. Barely a day passes without another outpouring of ill-informed nastiness resurfacing. The dust had hardly settled when Hanson's denigration of Indigenous Australians as "primitive" also came to light.

She's been trafficking in this nonsense her entire political career.

Albo's old social housing home still stands but is now hemmed in by apartments. The trucks have long gone, along with the biscuit factory. And the aircraft which made life miserable are........

© Canberra Times