Emotional priorities often change as people grow older. Pauline Hanson’s latest remarks raise a more troubling question about what happens when grievance is repeatedly rewarded instead.

Picture a woman in an empty city office in the middle of the night, cleaning. It is 1963. Her hands already ache in a way that will get worse every year for the rest of her life. A few kilometres away, in a council flat in Camperdown across the road from the children’s hospital, a similar flat to the one she was born in, a baby is asleep. She will finish the shift, get home and spend the day looking after him. She will keep doing this until the disease in her joints takes the choice away from her, and then she and the boy will live on the disability pension. She will never own a home; there will never be an expensive car in the driveway or expensive family holidays. That flat will be her home for the rest of her life. She will die in 2002, at 65, and the boy she raised alone will become prime minister of Australia. That alone should define what Australia should really celebrate.

That is the life Pauline Hanson called pathetic.

She did it in February, sitting across from Karl Stefanovic on his podcast. Albanese’s references to growing up in public housing were “pathetic”, she said. Housing commission homes were a helping hand for people who had jobs. They should not be there for people to live in for 30 or 40 years. Then the line that has now been replayed on every network: “he said his mother lived in the same one she was born in for 65 years.”

The comments sat unnoticed for seven months until The Australian reported them at the weekend. On Sunday morning, at Admiralty House, a 63-year-old man who has spent his adult life in an unforgiving business stood in front of the cameras and could not hold his face together. His bottom lip went. What came out was not a talking point. “My mother was way out of Pauline Hanson’s league. Way out of it.”

Anyone who has buried a mother knew exactly what they were watching. Twenty-four years does not close that wound. It only teaches you how to hold the stitches together. Hanson, of course, tried to pull the stitches apart.

The facts of Maryanne Albanese’s life are not in dispute. She raised her son alone. After he was born she cleaned offices overnight and cared for him during the day. Severe rheumatoid arthritis slowly crippled her. She and her son lived on the disability pension. She was, in his words on Sunday, compassionate not uncaring, generous not mean, kind not nasty, a person of great character. These are traits that the majority of Australians love and wish were more present in politics.

By Hanson’s own test, Maryanne Albanese passes. Hanson said the commission houses of her childhood were for people who worked. Maryanne Albanese worked, at night, cleaning other people’s offices, until her body would not let her. Proper working-class work, work those of us who grew up in these communities hold dear to our heart. Hanson did not know that because she did not care to know it, and........

© Pearls and Irritations