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.”

Well, he is right.

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 some within our communities may argue she could not know it – she was and is not us. That is not a gap in her research. But it is a trait that has slowly built a ceiling on One Nation’s support across the country.

I know this story from the inside. For a time, my mother raised me on her own. She worked whatever she could get: odd jobs, cleaning, minding other people’s children as a live-in nanny, anything that paid. I was her universe. Children know when they are that, and they never quite lose the knowledge. She would do anything to survive and to feed her kid, and anything is not a figure of speech when the other option is a night with nothing. The two of us lived in the spare bedrooms of the people who hired her, and when there was no spare bedroom, in the shed out the back. I do not tell this as a hard luck story. Half the country has one.

Hanson told Stefanovic that public housing should be for a limited time, a hand up, and then you move on for the next ones coming through. That sentence has a picture on the other side of it, and the picture is a woman and a child in someone else’s shed. That is what moving on looks like when there is nowhere to move on to. Maryanne Albanese, crippled and alone with a small boy, had one thing Hanson wants to deprive mothers like Maryanne of: a door and a room that was hers for as long as she lived. Hanson looked at that door and that room and called it a rort.

My mother still rents today, after a lifetime of work and raising kids. None of it was ever really free, but tough, humbling and riddled with fear and loathing. There was never a house. She is at an age when she should be paying nothing to anyone, and every fortnight she pays her rent. I have written elsewhere about what it does to the people of my generation to watch their parents’ present and see their own future in it. So when Hanson says a woman should not have been allowed to stay in her flat for 65 years, I do not hear a policy. I hear mothers like Maryanne, my mother and millions like them, described as a cost, a target, defined as lesser of a human.

Don Farrell called these remarks appalling and demanded an apology. Andrew Hastie, still in a running fight with Hanson over the One Nation cartoon that called him a traitor, said nobody’s late mother should be dragged into politics. Even Barnaby Joyce, now inside One Nation, put daylight between himself and it. All of that is politics, and politics will do what it does with it. I want to make a different argument.

Something is supposed to happen to a person by the time they are 72, and we know a good deal about what it is.

The best account of it comes from Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at Stanford who has spent more than 30 years studying how people change as they age. Her socioemotional selectivity theory starts from a simple observation. When people are young, time feels open-ended, and they chase what open-ended time rewards: knowledge, novelty, status, a career, building a life. As people age and begin to sense that their time is finite, their priorities reorganise. They stop collecting and start keeping. They pare their lives back to the relationships that matter and invest more deeply in each one. They pay more attention to what is good and let more of what is bad go, a pattern the field calls the positivity effect. They become slower to anger and quicker to forgive, less interested in winning the argument and more interested in keeping the people in the room.

Study after study since has found the same thing from different angles: older adults report more emotional empathy than younger ones, they are more moved by another person’s suffering, and they are more likely to meet conflict with patience than confrontation. Carstensen’s point is that this is not decline, and it is not going soft. It is what maturity or wisdom, moulded by time, looks like. The shortening of the horizon is what finally teaches people what matters, and her own studies find that emotional wellbeing rises with age for exactly that reason.

Anyone who has spent time around men in their 50s has seen the everyday version. The bloke who shot rabbits and pigs from the age of 14 stands in a paddock at dusk with the rifle up and the animal in the sights, and he lowers it, and he feels like a fool, and he goes home. He cannot watch a dog get hurt in a film. He changes the channel when the story is about a child. Later, at the pub, he will say he just could not do it any more, with some embarrassment, because it was not what he expected of himself, and the men around him will nod, because half of them have been there.

It arrives whether or not you invited it, and most people, once it has arrived, feel a lot better for it. An aside: for women, this ‘come to Jesus moment’ arrives when they give birth.

Hanson is 72. This is the age at which the man in the paddock has long since put the rifle in the cupboard. Instead she looked at a woman who died 24 years ago, who cleaned offices at night with hands that were slowly seizing up, who raised a child alone on a disability pension, and she saw a bludger.

But she has a long history of saying what she believes in, and it is not a slip. In 1996 it was Asians. In 2016 it was Muslims. In 2017 it was autistic children who should be taken out of mainstream classrooms. In 2019 it was women who lie about domestic violence. In 2020 it was the residents of the Flemington and North Melbourne towers, locked in without warning, whom she described on breakfast television as drug addicts and alcoholics who could not speak English. Nine took her off air that day. Now it is a dead single mother. Thirty years, and the line that rises through most people’s 50s and 60s has, in her case, never moved.

Here is where I want to part company with most of the commentary. The political reading of this week is easy and I could write it in my sleep: what it does to One Nation’s soft vote, how Labor will use it in the outer suburbs, whether it hurts her with women. Some of that is even true. But it is the least interesting thing about what happened, and I think it is the wrong place to look.

I am not going to pretend to know what is going on inside Pauline Hanson. Nobody watching from outside her life can, and the people who diagnose politicians from their couches do the mental health field no favours. What I can say is that the thing we all saw is not really a political fact. It is a human one. Something that reliably arrives with age, that arrives in factory workers and farmers and cleaners and prime ministers, that arrived in my mother and in Maryanne Albanese, has not arrived in a woman of 72 who has spent 30 years on the national stage. And the stage is the point. She has spent those 30 years in an industry that rewarded her every time the tenderness failed to show up. Every burqa, every insult, every attack on a group that could not hit back was met with cameras and preferences and a bigger platform. Politics, and the media that feeds on it, has built a machine that pays a person never to make the turn, and then acts surprised when she does not.

That is a mental health question before it is a political one. It is a question about what it does to a person to live for decades in permanent grievance, and about what it does to a country to watch it and call it entertainment. Carstensen’s work is clear that the turn toward tenderness in later life is not a loss. It is where wellbeing in later life comes from. A public life that stops a person from making it is not doing her a kindness, whatever her voters think, and it is certainly not doing one to the people she aims at.

Because look at who they are. The carers. The grieving. The people in the towers who did not know where the next meal was coming from. The families in council flats whose one piece of security is the door that is theirs. The link between secure housing and mental health is one of the better established findings in public health, and the people who rely on that security in Australia are overwhelmingly the people who have nothing else.

When a 72-year-old woman with a national platform tells them that their door, their room, is a rort, she is not making a policy point. She is pulling at the one thread on a stitch holding a great many people together.

I have argued before that mental health is not a niche issue in this country, that it is the electorate, as important as the cost of living crisis. This week is what that looks like when it walks into politics and is treated like a football. A grieving son in front of the cameras. A dead mother turned into a talking point. Those pondering what Hanson said should spend less time on what it means for the polls and more time on what it means that a country in the middle of a mental health crisis still hands a microphone to cruelty and calls it plain speaking.

Maryanne Albanese was way out of Pauline Hanson’s league. So is my mother. So, I suspect, is nearly every mother in the country. The question is not what Hanson’s words cost her. It is what they cost the rest of us watching this sad form of politics, and why we needed a grieving son to say so.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.