Claire Harvey: We’re lucky to have Pauline Hanson and Jacqui Lambie in Parliament

While most MPs can only manage empty phrases like ‘working families’, both Pauline Hanson and Jacqui Lambie are single mums. They’re the real deal, writes Claire Harvey.

Here’s something I didn’t think I’d be writing in 2017: I’m really glad Pauline Hanson is a member of federal Parliament. Same for Jacqui Lambie.

Why? Because they might be, in a strange kind of way, our bulwark against the rise of some cheap razzle-dazzle phony.

Just by being themselves — by being loud, ocker, inarticulate single mums. They’re Shazza from the chicken shop, and they’re in the Senate.

And they get something about Australians that no other MPs do. This week, Hanson and Lambie — both of whom are routinely mocked for their accents and their understanding of policy — delivered the most riveting few moments of parliamentary debate I’ve seen in a decade.

They stood up in the plush leather of the Senate, two ­middle-aged women with plentiful eyeliner and raging tempers, talking in the angriest tones about their experience as struggling single mothers.

It was great.

Most MPs can only manage faked-up huffiness and empty phrases like “working families”.

Both Hanson and Lambie have had lives of worry and hardship, deserved or not. Hanson has been to jail. Lambie has been a disability pensioner. Both are single mums.

The way they talk — the inflections and the mispronunciations and their accents — is important, because they sound more like most Australians than the rest of the MPs put together. But it’s not just their accents. They are closer to the experience and worldview of a majority of Australians than some of us would like to admit.

“There were times when I had to say no to my son, who was great at football, great at athletics and great at basketball, and who had the vantage (sic) of being able to represent his state,” Lambie said.

“I told him on two occasions, ‘I’m sorry, mate, but you can’t go because I can’t afford for you to go.’ At one stage there he was wearing football boots that were too small for him, from the winter beforehand, because I could not afford to get him some... There were times when I would sit in a corner and cry because I felt so ashamed.”

Lambie’s anger was all about welfare savings that will hit the poorest families in Australia — in particular, the Government’s decisions to freeze family tax benefit, and also to make single parents wait a week to get income support.

Let’s hear it for the single mums! (Pic: AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)

Those measures were part of a deal agreed to by crossbenchers including Hanson, Derryn Hinch, and Nick Xenophon, as part of the Government’s new childcare package.

Hanson took it personally. She fired back at Lambie, lip quivering in fury. “I started working in a shop serving at 12 years of age, and started a fulltime job at 15 years of age. I had my first child at 17 and my second by the time I was 21,” Hanson said.

“I was a single mother at 22 and having to work, so I know what being a battler is about. I found the money to put food on the table to feed my two children, and I made sure they could eat... Unless we pull back the deficit of this country, we will not have the money to support the aged, the sick and the necessary (sic) in future generations.”

If we are to avoid a lurch to the kind of depressing, snake-oil bombast of Donald Trump, it will be because our Parliaments are already representative of all of us. Australian voters don’t have to turn over the table to feel heard.

Here’s something most politicians don’t get — and another reason I’m glad Hanson and Lambie are in Parliament.

Single mothers are not bludgers. Normal Australians get that. Most politicians don’t. They think it’s a fundamental tenet of Australian political sentiment that we can’t stand bludgers (true) and that we must therefore think all single mothers are hopeless crones who can’t hang onto a bloke, pumping out kids to get the pension (totally false).

Anyone who believes that needs to spend a bit more time in the real Australia. Most of us have a close friend who is a single parent. Or we were raised by one. Or we are one.

I’m blissfully married, but becoming a mother has required every shred of my patience, maturity, intelligence, and humour. And money.

The experience has given me an enormous sense of respect and admiration for the parents who do it by themselves. It’s not just the struggle for money. It’s also the lack of an ally; someone to laugh with when you feel like crying. Nobody chooses that. But sometimes circumstances land someone alone, doing their best, needing some extra help.

Single mothers deserve our respect and they deserve to be heard. I just hope the other politicians have been listening.