This might surprise you, but there are plenty of people with jobs who live in public housing.

And you can discount the first 18 years or so, being that she wasn’t an adult and was presumably with her parents. Which gives you a little clue about the socioeconomic class she was in.

And being a single mum in the '60s wasn’t a walk in the park either. Plenty of gender inequality in wages/job conditions, plenty of “a woman’s place is in the kitchen”, and plenty of leaving high school in grade 8/9 after doing “home economics” (read: cooking and sewing). After that, with 18 years of looking after your kid, it’s too late to go back to uni/tafe in the '80s when you’re in your '40s, because you don’t have the time outside of work to even think about meeting entry requirements. So you’re stuck with the low-pay jobs in an economic climate that was busily inflating property values as much as possible.

So give Albo’s mum a break. She managed to get her son enough of a leg up to get out of the trap she was in.