Paul Hogan rips into ‘pelican’ Pauline Hanson over monoculture push
Australian film star Paul Hogan has attacked Pauline Hanson after the One Nation leader pointed to him as an example of the kind of monocultural Australia she wants.
Earlier this month, in her maiden address to the National Press Club, Hanson argued that Australia should move away from multiculturalism and become “monocultural”, which she described as “[living] under the one cultural umbrella”.
She repeated that position in the Senate last week and cited Hogan along with television character Norman Gunston as models, saying: “These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there’s nothing remotely exclusionary about them,” she said.
Speaking to The Australian Financial Review, Hogan dismissed Hanson’s remarks and made clear he does not share her position on multiculturalism.
“She’s living in the past, obviously,” he said.
“I’ve always had a very simple rule: What makes a good Australian is wanting to be one.”
Hogan, who now lives in California, also likened Hanson unfavourably to US President Donald Trump.
“She’s a pelican… outrageous, so racist. It sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump,” he added.
Recent weeks saw One Nation rise to the top of several polls, but Hanson and her party have slipped in the latest polling after her National Press Club comments.
Hogan, who was raised in Western Sydney and once worked as a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, said the immigrants he knew in those years strengthened the country.
“My old gang was an Assyrian, a Thursday Islander, a Welshman, an Aboriginal, a couple of Irish convicts. It was the same cosmopolitan types everywhere I worked, Italians, Greek, Irish, Chinese, a bit of everybody there. That’s the way we were,” he said.
“How can it be a monoculture? We’re all migrants, except the Aboriginals, who as far as we know have been [in Australia] for 60,000 years.”
Hogan became famous in the 1970s on The Paul Hogan Show, then turned into one of Australia’s best-known faces worldwide in 1986 with Crocodile Dundee.
Even so, he said he should not be treated as some idealised version of the typical Australian.
“I got there from a bad Viking … he went to Ireland and raped and pillaged and … that’s why there was blonde hair, blue-eyed, Irish people. And then, of course, the ones he bred turned out to be thieves, so they went off to the prison down under,” Hogan said, referencing his ancestry and links to Australia’s convict beginnings.
Hogan has lived in the United States since the mid-2000s and regularly returns to Australia. He said he remains overseas to stay near his youngest son, Chance, but intends to come back for good later in life.
“I’m only here for my son. When he’s settled, I can’t wait to get back. I don’t have a time scale, but I want to die in Australia,” Hogan said.
