The declaration that mothers should be "left out of politics" sounds like one of those civilising rules that everyone ought to accept. Andrew Hastie invoked essentially that principle in condemning Pauline Hanson's remarks about Anthony Albanese's late mother, and there is something admirable in the instinct behind it. Families should not automatically become targets merely because one member enters public life. A politician's mother, husband, wife or child does not surrender all claims to privacy simply because somebody else in the family wins an election.
The difficulty begins when that sensible presumption is converted into an absolute prohibition. Mothers have never really been outside politics. Motherhood has been debated by philosophers, feminists, conservatives, economists, psychologists and governments for generations. Politicians themselves routinely introduce their mothers into their political biographies. Journalists examine the childhood experiences of leaders when attempting to explain their adult beliefs. Once those facts are admitted, "leave mothers out of politics" ceases to be a rule and becomes a much more difficult question about where legitimate political scrutiny ends and gratuitous personal attack begins.
The present controversy demonstrates the problem unusually well. Pauline Hanson criticised Albanese's repeated references to his Housing Commission upbringing and questioned the fact that his mother, Maryanne Albanese, remained in the same public housing home for 65 years. Albanese responded emotionally, defending a mother who raised him alone while living with rheumatoid arthritis and relying upon a disability pension. Hanson undoubtedly personalised her argument, and Albanese was understandably angered by it. The factual dispute, however, does not end there. Contemporary reporting confirms both the exceptionally long tenancy and the difficult circumstances under which Maryanne Albanese raised her son.
That creates two different questions which should not be confused. Was Maryanne Albanese, given her disability and economic circumstances, an appropriate example for Hanson's argument about dependency upon public housing? Perhaps not. Is the operation of a public-housing system capable of providing the same dwelling for 65 years a legitimate subject for political examination? Obviously it is. Rejecting Hanson's choice of example does not settle the policy question that the example raises.
There is an interesting historical irony here because the intellectual culture that supposedly requires motherhood to remain beyond political examination has spent half a century doing precisely the opposite. Feminist scholarship did not treat motherhood as an untouchable private sanctuary. It made motherhood one of its great subjects of political analysis.
Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, first published in 1976, is an obvious example, although Rich's actual argument is subtler than the caricature sometimes made of it. She distinguished the experience of mothering from the social and political institution of motherhood. Rich was not simply denouncing mothers or declaring maternal relationships oppressive. She was arguing that an intimate human relationship had been organised within institutions and expectations through which male-dominated societies exercised power over women. Her work became enormously influential precisely because it made something traditionally classified as private into a legitimate object of political inquiry.
The principle extended far beyond Rich. Feminist scholarship examined domestic labour, childcare, marriage, reproductive expectations, the division of household work and the economic dependence historically associated with motherhood. The slogan that "the personal is political" captured the larger intellectual transformation. Relations previously protected from political scrutiny by the boundary of the household could themselves embody structures of economic and social power.
One need not agree with that tradition to recognise the importance of what it accomplished intellectually. It destroyed the proposition that motherhood becomes immune from political analysis merely because motherhood belongs partly to private life. Once an institution affects economic relations, welfare policy, employment, taxation, childcare, education and the distribution of public resources, it is inevitably political as well as personal.
That makes the present insistence upon the sanctity of motherhood rather peculiar. We apparently accept without difficulty an academic literature analysing motherhood as an institution shaped by patriarchy, capitalism and government policy, yet become deeply uncomfortable when discussion moves from the institution to a particular case connected to a politician. There may be good reasons for that discomfort, but they need to be stated rather than disguised behind the impossible command to "leave mothers out of politics".
The same difficulty appears when psychology enters political biography. Nobody seriously believes that the formative experiences of political leaders are entirely irrelevant to understanding them. Biographers routinely examine parents, childhoods, schools, class backgrounds, religious influences, family conflicts and early experiences of wealth or poverty. Donald Trump's relationship with his father, Fred Trump, has generated an enormous literature because writers have regarded that relationship as potentially relevant to understanding the adult politician. Whether every psychological inference drawn from such material is justified is another question, but the legitimacy of examining formative influences is scarcely controversial.
Why should growing up in public housing be different? Albanese himself plainly does not think it is irrelevant. His upbringing by a single mother in a Camperdown Housing Commission home has been a recurring component of his political story. He presents it, understandably, as evidence of both his origins and the possibilities offered by Australian society. A boy raised by a mother on a disability pension in public housing can become prime minister. It is a powerful story.
But political biography cannot reasonably operate in only one direction. If an experience can be introduced as evidence supporting a politician's authenticity, values and understanding of ordinary Australians, other people must be free to ask whether that same experience might have influenced his political assumptions in ways they consider less desirable. The conclusion might be wrong, unfair or unsupported, but the question itself cannot become illegitimate merely because its answer might be politically inconvenient.
This does not mean Maryanne Albanese became a politician retrospectively. She did not choose public life, died in 2002 and cannot answer her critics. Those facts should impose restraint upon anyone discussing her. There is an obvious moral difference between analysing Albanese's political use of his upbringing and gratuitously attacking the character of his deceased mother.
That distinction provides a much better principle than "leave mothers out of politics." Relatives who have not entered public life should ordinarily be protected from irrelevant personal attacks. But facts concerning them can become politically relevant where the politician himself introduces those facts, where they materially illuminate a public-policy question, or where they form an important part of the politician's claimed political identity.
On that test, Maryanne Albanese's character should largely be left alone. Her relationship with Australia's public-housing system, however, cannot automatically be placed beyond discussion when that relationship has become part of the prime minister's own political biography.
This is where Hanson had a legitimate argument but selected a problematic target. Maryanne Albanese suffered severe rheumatoid arthritis, raised her son alone and depended upon a disability pension. If one wishes to demonstrate that able-bodied people capable of supporting themselves remain unnecessarily dependent upon public housing, she is hardly the obvious example. Hanson's opponents are entitled to make that point forcefully.
But the 65-year tenancy remains a remarkable fact about the operation of the system. It raises questions about what public housing is intended to accomplish, how security of tenure should operate, when continuing need should be reassessed and how scarce public housing should be distributed between existing tenants and people waiting for accommodation. Asking those questions does not require condemning the woman who lived within the rules of the system available to her.
That is the distinction missing from much of the outrage. Criticism of a welfare system is not necessarily criticism of people who legally use that system. A person receiving a government benefit is not responsible for designing eligibility rules. A tenant who is permitted to remain in public housing is not responsible for determining the government's tenure policy. Maryanne Albanese could therefore have been an admirable woman who acted entirely properly while her extraordinarily long tenancy simultaneously illustrates something worth examining about public policy.
Indeed, this is precisely how serious institutional criticism ought to work. Feminist scholars could criticise the institution of motherhood without claiming that individual mothers were wicked. Economists can criticise tax concessions without condemning taxpayers who legally claim them. Housing analysts can question indefinite tenure without accusing long-term tenants of wrongdoing. Institutions and individuals are different objects of criticism.
The more interesting question therefore concerns the political ownership of biography. Modern politicians increasingly sell voters highly curated personal narratives. They tell us about immigrant grandparents, struggling parents, working-class suburbs, family businesses, military service, religious upbringing and childhood hardship because these stories communicate political values more efficiently than policy papers ever could. Biography has become political capital.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Character matters in politics, and personal history can genuinely illuminate character. But politicians cannot reasonably demand the benefits of political biography while claiming immunity from its costs. Once a personal story is deliberately placed into the public argument, opponents must be entitled to interrogate the political conclusions supposedly flowing from it.
The alternative creates an extraordinary asymmetry. A politician could say, "My mother's experience proves that this institution is compassionate and necessary," while an opponent would be forbidden from replying, "Your mother's experience may reveal a problem with that institution," because the second statement has improperly introduced the politician's mother into politics. The contradiction is obvious: she was already there.
That is why the Hanson controversy should not finally be about whether mothers are "off limits." The category is too broad to be useful. A politician's mother's private medical details ordinarily should be irrelevant. Insults directed at her character ordinarily should be unacceptable. But a publicly established fact about a government program, repeatedly incorporated into the politician's own account of his upbringing, occupies different territory.
Nor does Albanese's understandable emotional response settle the question. His mother's death in 2002 does not make his grief artificial, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. A 63-year-old prime minister can remain deeply protective of his mother. But genuine emotion and legitimate political scrutiny can coexist. The sincerity of Albanese's response tells us something about his relationship with his mother; it tells us nothing by itself about the optimal design of Australian public-housing tenure.
That is precisely why politics needs rules more sophisticated than declarations that particular subjects are sacred. The private sphere deserves protection, but politicians themselves continually carry parts of it into the public sphere. Feminism recognised long ago that the boundary between private and political life is permeable. Political biography depends upon the same insight. Psychology depends upon it as well.
The defensible principle is therefore neither that politicians' families are fair game nor that they are untouchable. Families should be protected from irrelevant personal attack, particularly where relatives have never sought public attention. But politicians cannot turn selected portions of family history into political assets and simultaneously declare those portions unavailable for critical examination.
Pauline Hanson crossed the line when her argument became unnecessarily personal. Her critics cross another line when they pretend that this eliminates the policy question she was attempting to raise. Maryanne Albanese's circumstances deserve humane treatment; Australia's public-housing system deserves rigorous scrutiny. There is no contradiction between those propositions.
The irony is that decades of political and intellectual thought have taught us precisely this distinction. A mother is a human being deserving dignity. Motherhood is also an institution capable of political analysis. A public-housing tenant is a human being deserving dignity. Public housing is an institution capable of political analysis. Confusing criticism of the institution with condemnation of the individual is an effective way of preventing institutions from being criticised at all.
So, leave mothers out of gratuitous political abuse, certainly. Leave them out of fabricated scandals and attacks having nothing to do with public affairs. But once a politician himself makes his family history part of his political case, nobody should expect the argument to travel in only one direction.
The private sphere deserves respect. It does not confer political immunity.