Abbie Chatfield has criticised Sonia Kruger’s Gold Logie win, citing discriminatory comments the TV host made about the Muslim community in 2016.
Kruger, 57, who hosts multiple Channel 7 shows, took out Australian TV’s biggest honour at the awards in Sydney in late July, beating a competitive field including Hamish Blake and Leigh Sales.
Chatfield, 28, who attended the awards, has since spoken about Kruger’s controversial win on herIt’s A Lot podcast, describing her past comments about banning Muslim immigration to Australia as “disgusting”.
“Yeah, no, Sonia,” Chatfield began.
“It’s very easy for white feminists to be like, ‘A woman won. Aren’t you happy a woman won?’ Well, not someone that made discriminatory comments on the Today show about Muslim people.
“How about you use the privilege you have as a white woman to not discriminate against people of colour?”
Chatfield added: “You’ll be burnt forever in the eyes of Australian media if you have OnlyFans, or if you’re overtly sexual, or if you speak your mind too much, [but] everyone will just push something under the rug if you say something outwardly discriminatory.”
Former Bachelor contestant Chatfield was referencing Kruger’s comments on Today seven years ago following a terror attack in France.
“There is a correlation between the number of people who are Muslim in a country and the number of terrorist attacks,” Kruger said at the time.
“Now, I have a lot of very good friends who are Muslim, who are peace-loving, who are beautiful people, but there are fanatics.”
She continued that she would “like to see [immigration of Muslim people] stopped now for Australia. Because I want to feel safe, as all of our citizens do”.
Chatfield, who conceded successful screen personalities were often “talented and hardworking”, said that veteran TV hosts were being caught out by an evolving media landscape.
“People who are TV hosts are so beloved for being this vanilla version of themselves, then they’re asked about political issues and they don’t see how what they’re saying is crook,” she said.
“People in traditional media haven’t spoken about political views throughout the early stages of their career.
“I obviously speak about politics more than other people in mainstream media, but people who are not typical political commentators are [now] asked their views when big events happen.
“Sonia comes from an era where they never had to comment on anything and therefore they have these views that are simmering for years and fermenting. But they’re not expressing their views or exposed to other views because they’ve been doing a one-way medium, which is TV hosting.”
Chatfield further argued Kruger’s win spoke to the “lack of transitioning of talent” in Australian media, asking, “Why is everyone in media so f**king old?”
“We’ve had the same people on TV for 20, 30 years in this country,” she added.
“I’m consistently the youngest person on set and I’m almost 30. I’m not that young anymore. “No one is ever really given a chance to learn how to be a TV host or to be given a go of anything because they choose the same people over and over again.
“Everyone whose in media is like 50+, which is fine, but there’s no diversity of thought, let alone of race.”
Kruger has never apologised for her comments about Muslims, despite the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal initially ruling in 2019 that her comments would likely have encouraged “hatred towards, or serious contempt for, Australian Muslims by ordinary members of the Australian population”.
However, the complaint was dismissed and Kruger was found not guilty of racial vilification because the Muslim community in Australia does not have “a common ethno-religious origin”.