Last week, actor and presenter Jay Laga'aia and fellow actor Firass Dirani spoke out about the lack of racial diversity on Australian television (with particular regard to soaps).

Dirani said, ‘‘American TV, British TV, have shows with different nationalities — and they’re not just putting different nationalities up for a point of difference, they’re creating work that caters for actors of different backgrounds", to which Laga'aia replied on Twitter, "As someone who lost his job on H&A because they couldnt write two ethnics that weren’t together, I’d like a chance to ply my trade freely."

The response from on high was alarming. A Seven spokesman, in a written statement, decried Laga'aia's comments as "offensive", adding that "We have great regard for Jay and his work on Home and Away during the last two years. It is insulting to suggest that Home and Away is racist."

Really, Seven? Because I'm pretty sure that in the long, long history of Summer Bay, you could probably count on two hands (possibly one) the number of characters who were non-white. You could probably halve that number again if you subtracted the non-white characters who were criminals, weirdos, sex pests or blow-ins.

Naturally, the TV industry went into a spree of hand-wringing, debating Dirani and La'gaia's suggestion on one side and fervently denying it on the other.

Now, I'm a white person: it's not my job to go in to bat and speak on behalf of Australian people of colour. However as a TV critic, I'm pretty well qualified to talk about what I see on Australian screens: precisely the same thing that Dirani and Laga'aia have brought to the nation's attention, which is a hopeless lack of racial diversity in both fiction and news/current affairs/panel shows.

Particularly striking was The Project's response, in which an all-white panel asked a white "expert" if Australian TV was "too white".



(You may have also noticed that their parade of white faces montage included former Neighbours star Dichen Lachman, who is of Tibetan descent. Top work, research team!)

It's a perfect crystallisation of the problem at hand: you could say, for example, that they "can't help it" that the panel is all white on the night. "They were just the right people for the job," you might say, "maybe they couldn't get an expert who wasn't white."

But it's that complacency that leads us to the very situation that Australian television finds itself in: to wit, congratulating Neighbours for finally having introduced a little racial diversity to Ramsay Street after 28 seasons - or 27 years, if you prefer - of whitewashing.



The Kapoor family moved in this year, and what a warm welcome the show's fans gave them online: so filled with racist remarks that the show had to go on a comment-deleting spree.

I recently went on a holiday to New Zealand and was struck by the level of diversity on TV there (particularly when it came to indigenous people). While my viewing was limited mostly to a few soaps and the daily news, even within that context a wide variety of ethnicities were represented. I couldn't imagine the same thing happening on Australian TV. US and UK television is similarly diverse.

Inevitably the denial brigade will bleat things like "But America is a bigger country, so it makes sense", which is a redundant argument since Australia has long had an incredibly diverse population.

As many have noted (in somewhat self-congratulatory fashion), there have been a bunch of ABC and SBS shows that have addressed on-screen diversity: East West 101, The Slap, The Straights, The Circuit, and so on (and on the factual side of things, shows like Message Stick and Marngrook Footy Show).

What such points-scoring fails to realise, though, is that the fact we've produced a few series with racially diverse casts isn't reason to rest on our laurels: it should be motivation to make even more shows of that ilk.

Pedestrian used The Secret Life Of Us as an example, comparing what the show - based upon a group of friends living in St Kilda and working in Melbourne - depicted versus the reality of life in Melbourne:

- Melbourne has the largest Greek speaking population in the world outside of Greece.
- Around 35% of the city was born overseas - a figure which far exceeds the national average of 23.1%.
- Over 100,000 residents speak Chinese at home.
- The Vietnamese surname Nguyen is the second most common listing in the phone book. The first is Smith.
- Melbourne has the largest Jewish population in Australia and is home to the largest population of Holocaust survivors per capita outside of Israel.
- Melbourne is home to the largest Indian and Sri Lankan communities in Australia

(That last point makes the overdue arrival of Neighbours' Kapoor family even more galling, doesn't it?)

Another nasty side effect of debate like this is when armchair commentators start complaining that certain non-white actors "get all the roles". Well, it's not the actors' fault, is it? Blame the casting agents: it's because of them that your average Australian television viewer could only name, say, four Aboriginal actors and maybe one or two "Ethnic" comedians.

I'm sure the "argument" goes something like "Well, if we cast a non-white actor, our audience will turn off". So? Good riddance! An ethnically diverse TV landscape means other communities will tune in.

It's true that Australian TV casting tends towards the conservative at the best of times (witness the omnipresent Rebecca Gibney), but casting the same white actors over and over again is in a very different ballpark to not casting actors of diverse ethnicities at all.

To end on a salient but hilarious note, I'll leave you with this opening sketch from Gary Foley and Bob Maza's Basically Black, from 1973, because there's no point trying to find any recent TV comedy that features any real semblance of diversity (Chris Lilley in a variety of SFX makeups does not count):



The ball's in your court, casting agents/networks/advertisers.