‘She’s a pelican’: Paul Hogan slams Pauline Hanson monoculture comments
Australian film icon Paul Hogan has hit out at Pauline Hanson after the One Nation leader named him as an example of her dreams for a monocultural Australia.
Hanson, in her maiden address to the National Press Club earlier this month, controversially claimed Australia needed to move away from being a multicultural society, instead saying the country needed to be “monocultural”, meaning “[living] under the one cultural umbrella”.
Hogan derided Hanson’s comments as out of date, saying immigrants made Australia a better place. Hanna Lassen
She doubled down on her comments in the Senate last week, holding up Hogan and TV character Norman Gunston as ideals to aspire to: “These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there’s nothing remotely exclusionary about them,” she said.
Hogan, speaking to The Australian Financial Review, has derided Hanson’s comments, saying he explicitly rejects her views 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.”
One Nation’s standing in the polls has taken a hit after Hanson’s comments at the National Press Club. Hilary Wardhaugh
Hogan who now lives in the California, compared her negatively 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.
One Nation shot to the top of a number of polls in recent weeks, though Hanson and her party’s standing have taken a hit in the most recent polls in the wake of her comments at the National Press Club.
Hogan, who grew up in Western Sydney and worked as a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, said several immigrants that he met during this time had made Australia better.
“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 lives in the United States, but said he wants to return to Australia towards the end of his life. AP
Hogan shot to fame in the 1970s on The Paul Hogan Show, before becoming one of the most recognisable Australians in the world in 1986 when he starred in Crocodile Dundee.
However, he insisted he should not be held up as the perfect and 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 US since the mid-2000s, but regularly visits Australia.
He said he lives abroad to be closer to his youngest son, Chance, but insists the time will come when he will return to Australia.
“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.
