Politics & Power Quote by Pauline Hanson

A neat little populist magic trick is happening here: Pauline Hanson frames a deeply technical lever of the economy as a straightforward act of political will. "Must" turns a complex ecosystem - central bank independence, inflation targets, global capital flows - into a moral obligation. The line doesn’t argue a policy so much as it assigns blame in advance: if interest rates stay high, it’s because "the government" didn’t try hard enough.

The phrasing is telling. It’s not "households" or "mortgages" but "business" that gets foregrounded, a nod to small-business identity politics: the corner shop, the local contractor, the battler-entrepreneur. That’s Hanson’s recurring move - translating macroeconomics into an everyday grievance, then offering government muscle as the fix. It’s pro-business rhetoric that keeps one foot in anti-elite suspicion: the implicit villain is a distant financial system, and possibly the Reserve Bank, without naming it.

Context matters because in Australia interest rates are set by the RBA, not ministers. So the promise can function as a pressure campaign as much as a plan: signal to voters you’ll lean on institutions, rewrite the boundaries, or at least pick a fight on their behalf. Subtext: orthodoxy is optional when people are hurting.

It also quietly reframes the risk. Cutting rates is always sold as relief, rarely as trade-offs: inflation, asset bubbles, punishing savers. Hanson’s sentence works because it offers certainty in a domain defined by uncertainty - and because certainty, in politics, is a product people keep buying.