‘Egg Boy’ William Connolly, Jacinda Ardern appear on The Project

William Connolly, the teen best known as “egg boy”, has spoken out for the first time since his egging of Fraser Anning, as NZ PM Jacinda Ardern spoke of her “deep sadness”.

Egg Boy appears on The Project.

William Connolly, the Melbourne teenager best known as “egg boy”, has spoken out for the first time since his egging of Senator Fraser Anning.

Mr Connolly, who egged the Queensland Senator in the wake of his comments blaming Muslim immigration for the Christchurch terror attack which killed 50 people, said the incident has been blown out of proportion, while appearing on Channel 10’s The Project this evening.

The 17-year-old Melbourne teenager told host Hamish Macdonald he realises it was not the “right thing to do”, but he was not expecting Mr Anning, who threw two punches at the teen, to react to being egged.

Fraser Anning is egged by 17-year-old William Connolly.

“I didn’t expect him to react, I thought I was just going to walk out there. I didn’t think this was going to blow up,” Mr Connolly told Macdonald.

“In fact, it’s blown up completely out of proportion to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing because too much of the attention is brought away from the real victims suffering — we should be focusing on them,” Mr Connolly continued.

“I understand what I did was not the right thing to do,” Mr Connolly said by way of an apology.

“However, this egg has united people and, you know, money has been raised — tens of thousands of dollars — has been raised for those victims,” Mr Connolly continued.

A GoFundMe campaign, which was set up to help Mr Connolly pay for any legal fees and to “buy more eggs”, has raised almost $80,000. The money will be donated to the victims of Christchurch.

“I’ve had one lady reach out to one of my friends in Christchurch and she said to me that throughout this period of darkness in her life (it) was the one time she smiled since the tragedy and that — I’m speechless,” Mr Connolly said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also appeared on The Project, admitting to host Waleed Aly she had not spent much time with her family, and that motherhood had changed with the way she has responded to the Christchurch terror attack.

“I think it’s probably hard to analyse the way you are changed by parenthood but you feel it and certainly when I visited with families, when I’ve seen the husbands and wives (of the victims) and the grief surrounding it, I felt it very deeply,” Ms Ardern said.

Ms Ardern also told Aly wearing the hijab in the days after the attack was not something she thought about, but was “so obvious that it would be the appropriate thing to do”.

Jacinda Ardern waves as she leaves Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand. Picture: AP

“What I underestimated was that (wearing the hijab) would give people a sense of security, it didn’t occur to me for a moment that there would those women in the community who felt unsafe wearing their faith, and so if in wearing the hijab as I did gave them a sense of security to continue to practice their faith then I’m very pleased I did it,” Ms Ardern said.

Ms Ardern said it would be naive for her to say there are not “pockets of ideology” of extremist in New Zealand, and that the news the attacker, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, was Australian, was a shock for her.

“That was news which did take time for me to process,” Ms Ardern said.

“I think New Zealanders are reflecting on the fact that it was not one of us because in part that helps us process what happened here.”