Nature & Animals Quote by Pauline Hanson

A neat little ambush disguised as self-deprecation, Hanson’s “fish and chip shop lady” line is less about humility than about authority: she claims credibility precisely by rejecting the credentialed kind. The opening “I may be only…” performs a class-coded shrug that invites the audience to underestimate her for half a beat, then flips it into an attack on economists as sheltered, overeducated, and practically incompetent. It’s populist rhetoric at its most efficient: elevate lived experience, delegitimize expertise, and frame the speaker as the lone adult in the room.

The insult is carefully domestic. “Textbooks” versus “a job in the real world” isn’t just anti-academic; it’s anti-abstract. She’s saying the people designing policy don’t have to balance a budget, meet payroll, or feel prices rising at the checkout. Then she sharpens it with “I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping,” turning macroeconomics into a simple competence test. Grocery shopping is universally legible, gendered, and immediate: if you can’t manage a trolley, why should you manage a nation?

Context matters because this is not a neutral critique of bad forecasting; it’s a bid to shift the terms of political trust. Hanson positions economists as a priesthood speaking a private language, and herself as the translator for voters who suspect they’re being talked down to. The subtext is resentment with a purpose: if experts feel distant, their recommendations can be treated not as difficult truths but as self-serving ideology.