EDITORIAL: Chalmers on the attack as Hanson shows soft side

Jim Chalmers has been quietly copping the kind of budget blowback a bloke would surely begin to take personally. Digs like “worst budget ever” and “biggest stinker since Hockey’s howler in 2014” have got to start to sting eventually.

But the criticism also appears to have lit a fire under the man who would be Prime Minister, springing as he has out of the gates knowing he has some serious ground to make up.

Chalmers was in fine form in an address to Labor Party delegates on Thursday, taking pot shots at Liberal leader Angus Taylor, fobbing off detractors and doubling down on the opportunities he says his budget has created for hardworking Australians.

“Our opponents who say we’re pulling up the ladder don’t understand there’s not much point in a ladder with the first few rungs missing,” Dr Chalmers said.

“Not everybody is born already at the top of the ladder like Angus Taylor was, not everybody fails upwards like he has.”

Taking lines straight from the comrade’s companion, Chalmers sought to challenge One Nation’s surging popularity among Labor’s traditional supporter base by casting it as a billionaire-controlled anti-battler party.

“Unlike One Nation, we vote the way workers need us to, not the way Gina Rinehart tells us to.

“The irony of their position is they want to change the government in order to leave everything as it is — a truly absurd proposition.”

He said too often the story of the budget was told by “the biggest beneficiaries of these current arrangements”, not “the biggest victims of the broken status quo”.

And as Anthony Albanese questions whether One Nation really has managed to raise more than $2 million in a couple of days, its leader continued to enjoy a rock star reception in Western Australia – showing supporters her vulnerable side by tearing up on a number of occasions.

“It was a political witch hunt,” she said of the time she was jailed for electoral fraud – charges which were later overturned.

“I was absolutely devastated. I could have just fallen into a heap. Anyway, I was handcuffed in that room. I was taken downstairs, and I was strip searched.

“I had a guard come up to me through the night, he said, ‘Hang in there, Pauline’, and he said, ‘My mum, my mother’s Aboriginal, but we fully support you, so please hang in there.’

“That night I just, I actually gave up. I stopped eating.”

It’s absolutely compelling stuff.

Likewise her lived experience with family and domestic violence and the weight of expectation she feels

But there was also a taste of the Hanson of old — the fire-tongued Ted Bullpitt of Australian politics that her new supporters may have chosen to forget.

“Am I racist? No, I’m not a racist. Do I care if people want to call me that? No.

“I am Australian, and I’m so proud of my country . . . I don’t have to open my heart, mind to anyone who doesn’t want to share those values with me. As far as I’m concerned, you can go back to where you came from.”

Responsibility for the editorial comment is taken by Editor-in-Chief Christopher Dore