Who participates?- Identifying diversity

Nick Giannopoulos
Writer, performer and comedian

Look, you only have to turn on your TV set at 6.30 or 7.00 o’clock, and have a look at the most popular soap operas overseas, Australian soap operas overseas: Home and Away and Neighbours. Look at the representative view of Australia we are giving to people in England and Europe, and other associated countries. It’s one of a predominantly blonde, surfy, blue-eyed, Anglo-Saxon background community. And that is wrong.

Because the people I believe who have the power in this country in terms of television – the owners of the television stations, the owners of the media – are predominantly Anglo-Saxon. And I don’t believe we’ll see a change until more people from non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds begin to find themselves in those professional positions; positions of management, people who are in control of the media. Because they are the only people who can understand the discrimination that has been faced by millions of people in this country. Because they have lived through it. And unfortunately that process in Australia has been very slow.

I think there are a lot of people in the media –journalists, owners – who want to establish a kind of Australian ethos, which they’re not really sure about either. You know those things of mateship, the larrikinism, the ockerism – you know, people say those things have disappeared. Really? Watch Water Rats, Watch Water Rats. Sure, the female detective in Water Rats has come up a notch from female characters, say in Cop Shop twenty years age. But have a look at how she survives in a man’s world – by being one of the boys, OK?

It’s great that they’re now casting actors of non-Anglo- Saxon background and giving them ethnic names, but they’re never alluding to their ethnic background, you know? You never really see anything about them that’s really ethnic. To me they come across as everybody else. So, it’s like – OK, look, I understand what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to make us all look like Australians. But we haven’t worked out what Australian means yet. We’re still a very confused community. We really don’t. You go and talk to ten different kids in a high school, and they won’t know how to answer that question. And the sad thing is, they’ll probably answer on the grounds of, you know, the ockerism and the things that the media pump into their heads. And then you say to them,” Have you been subjected to racism?” and they go, “Um, yes”.

The Australian ethos as projected by the Australian media is the wrong one. It’s wrong. Australia is a very diverse country and television has yet to show that diversity. It’s scared to show that diversity.

Interview for Making Multicultural Australia, 1996