Australian icon Paul Hogan has shared his thoughts on Pauline Hanson, days after the One Nation leader said Australia needed to be a monoculture, using the actor as an example of what the country needed.
“Bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston,” she told the Senate last week as she continued to define her vision for a One Nation Australia.
“These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there’s nothing remotely exclusionary about them.”
Well, Hogan is back (in the conversation) and Senator Hanson may not be happy with his thoughts.
Speaking from Los Angeles, where he now lives, Hogan, 86, described Hanson as “so racist” and a “pelican”.
“She’s living in the past, obviously,” Hogan told the AFR.
“I’ve always had a very simple rule: What makes a good Australian is wanting to be one.”
“She’s a pelican, yeah. Outrageous, so racist. It sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump.”
Hogan, who grew up in Sydney, described his close friends as a child, questioning what Australian Senator Hanson was talking about.
“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 told the outlet.
“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.”
“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.”
The Crocodile Dundee star said he would like to return to Australia later in life, when his son is older and established in the US, but he hoped it wouldn’t be an Australia defined by Senator Hanson’s plan.
“I’m only here (in the US) for my son,” Hogan told the AFR.
“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 – in a multicultural Australia!”
Mr Hogan’s wrangling of Senator Hanson’s declaration that he is one of two Australian ideals comes as the One Nation leader experiences a dip, slowing her meteoric rise in the polls.
Support for Hanson’s party dipped in the latest polls following her controversial National Press Club address, as Labor brands the major speech a “reality check” for Australians.
But the results are even more dire for the coalition, with the much-respected Newspoll showing backing for the opposition falling to a historic low of 17 per cent.
Labor has reclaimed a narrow lead in both the Newspoll and Redbridge surveys, released on Sunday night.
Newspoll, published by The Australian, has Labor on 33 per cent (up three), with One Nation on 29 (down two) and the Greens on 14 (up two).
The Redbridge poll had Labor on 30 per cent support (up two) compared to One Nation’s 29 (down two), with the Coalition on just 18 (down two) and the Greens on 14 (up two).
That poll, reported in the Australian Financial Review, also showed Senator Hanson’s net approval falling 10 points from a neutral position to be -10.
Cabinet Minister Murray Watt said the polls could be expected to bounce around between now and a federal election two years away.
“We have seen a bit of a change in the public mood towards One Nation since Pauline Hanson’s press club speech,” he told ABC News Breakfast on Monday.
“That speech was a bit of a reality check for a lot of Australians who were thinking about voting for One Nation, because they got to see that as much as people are under pressure at the moment, things could get worse under One Nation with all the cuts they were talking about imposing.”
Labor has been battling for post-budget credibility after breaking promises on tax.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said voters were “angry” at the system, and while he took the polling seriously, the election was still a way off.
“But we do know that we’ve got some real work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people and that takes time,” he told 2GB radio.
- with AAP
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