How far has Aussie TV come since Waleed's speech about diversity?

It was back in 2016 when The Project host Waleed Aly’s Gold Logies acceptance speech drew attention to the lack of cultural representation on local screens.

Immediately ‘diversity’ became a buzz word and there were more conversations about inclusion within the industry. But how far have we really come in those two years?

Waleed says “the progress is slow” and Australia still has a long way to go in achieving diversity beyond the Asians and Indians we see on MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules.

“I wouldn’t say that there’s been a huge change but these things are all incremental,” Waleed told Be at the 2018 Logie Awards. ­

“The progress is slow, I’d love it to be quicker but I don’t have control over that. These things take time.”

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Waleed acknowledged there has been somewhat of a shift in the industry in the past two years.

“I think there’s been a little bit,” he said, revealing there’s been “just bits and pieces I’ve seen and gone, ‘oh that’s interesting’, like it might be like a family on Neighbours or something like that”.

Last year Neighbours producers introduced an Indian family to Ramsay Street, played by a mixture of Indian-Australian and Sri Lankan-Australian actors who are still on the show a year later.

This is the second time a South Asian family has been written into the Neighbours script.

Back in 2013, actor Sachin Joab expressed his disappointment that his character, and the rest of the on-screen Kapoor family, had been written out of the soap.

“It was more of a shock to us knowing that it wasn’t just one multicultural actor who was being written out, it was every single multicultural full-time actor on the show,” he told Digital Spy at the time.

“All four of us were written out in the first year of our full-time contracts, which felt like a massive step backwards in terms of cultural diversity on the show.”

Meanwhile Neighbours’ main competition, Channel Seven soap Home and Away, has also stepped up its game in terms of diverse casting.

Sarah Roberts joined the cast last year, and the biracial actress says she’s “one hundred per cent proud” to be a role model for other girls from South Asian backgrounds.

The 31-year-old, who is half Sri Lankan and Australian, told Be the initial lack of diversity in Australia prompted her to move overseas earlier in her career.

“I think that’s one of the reasons I went to America, it’s because there weren’t enough roles here for women that looked like us,” she said.

“So it’s nice to be cast on an Australian drama that’s doing really well and my nationality isn’t specified on the show. It’s really exciting.”

During Waleed’s Logies speech in 2016, he mentioned an actor called Mustafa, who felt afraid to apply for acting roles with that name.

Later it was revealed that the mysterious Mustafa was Lebanese-Australian actor Tyler De Nawi, best known for his role on Channel Nine’s Here Come The Habibs.

The show’s creator Rob Shehadie, who is also Lebanese, admits he didn’t even know Tyler had changed his name when he hired him. All became clear during Waleed’s speech.

“I knew when we were sitting at the table and his face just dropped. And I said to him, ‘Is that you?’,” Rob revealed to Be.

Here Come The Habibs itself has played a part in helping change the Australian television landscape, with the show focusing on a Lebanese-Australian family living in Sydney.

But Rob says the program wasn’t even specifically created to fill a diversity gap in Australia.

“When we created it, we didn’t come at that angle,” he told Be at the Logie awards.

“We didn’t do it because we want to see more diversity. I’m Lebanese, I’m not going to play an Anglo surfer, let’s just be honest,” he laughed.

“We create shows that are for us and that we can play in and you know what, Australia enjoyed it and we’re up for a Logie tonight. So the numbers are there.

“There is a market out there, a big multicultural market out there in Australia and I guess we need to do more of it.”

Well there’s certainly more where that came from, with Rob’s new show Street Smart premiering on Channel Ten next month.

The comedy features a very diverse cast including Casey Donovan, Neel Kolhatkar, Andy Trieu, Maria Tran and Simon Elrahi.

“There’s so much diversity in this cast. It felt like home,” Casey told Be of her experience filming it.

“It’s always important. There’s lots of people from different backgrounds, colours, races, you name it. And it’s nice Australia is starting to break some of those moulds.”

Recently streaming services like Netflix and Stan have proved they’re a step ahead in terms of diverse casting for drama and comedy.

Stan’s six-part series Romper Stomper, a sequel to the original 1992 film, followed a far-right anti-Islamic group and a far-left antic-fascist group as they interacted with the rest of Australia.

Not only did the show feature diverse faces like Julian Maroun and Tysan Towney, but it explored Australia’s extremist politics and views towards migration.

Logie nominee Lachy Hulme, who portrayed the leader of the extremist group in the show, said he’s stoked with the industry’s progress since the 1990s.

“When I started out there was nothing but blonde haired, blue eyed people on television,” the 47-year-old told Be.

Speaking of Romper Stomper’s diverse cast, he said: “We’re the most multicultural society on the face of the planet, it’s been absolutely fantastic. The actors of different cultural backgrounds finally get [air time].”

Here’s hoping more actors have these opportunities to tell stories that resonate with the multicultural Australia we are today.

As Waleed says, “these things take time”, but there’s plenty of us who are tired of waiting.

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