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Pop CultureMay 17, 2016

Where are the Asian faces on our TV screens?

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New Zealand is rightly proud of the multi-ethnic and -cultural society it’s growing into. But while Māori and Pacific representation has improved since the ’80s, our exploding Asian population remains near-invisible. In part one of a two-part series, Sonia Gray tries to find out why.

Lately, I’ve been looking at the people around me and looking at the people on TV, and thinking “one of these things is not like the other.” Granted, my neighbourhood is as mixed-race as you can get. My kids go to the most ethnically-diverse primary school in New Zealand. Could it be that I’m living in some sort of Benetton bubble? Maybe the rest of the country is, y’know, whiter?

To find out if our television looks like the country it’s broadcasting to I conducted an informal survey. Armed with an Excel spreadsheet and an approximation of the 2016 New Zealand ethnic make-up, I did a good old-fashioned head count. Zeroing in on the ethnicity of the actors, presenters and reporters that feature on our primetime mainstream television is awkward. It’s not easy to squeeze 150 of our TV stars into labelled ethnic boxes – where do you put Wallace Chapman (part-Fijian) or Pippa Wetzell (part-Samoan) – but it was a wonderful excuse to watch lots of TV for “work purposes”.

I like local telly; give me Jono and Ben or Mastermind any day over Dawson solving e-crime on CSI Cyber. And it was heartening to return to Shortland St, after a viewing hiatus, to see that it’s still a proactive champion of diversity, tackling it from all angles and doing so in real time. But there were glaring gaps, like no Māori content anywhere near mainstream prime time TV. New Zealand On Air’s commitment to funding ethnically diverse projects means we have a bunch of brilliant shows like Fresh, Neighbourhood, The Hui and Marae. But these are deemed “non-commercially viable” by networks and so are ghettoised, programmed to screen early on weekend mornings, which makes it impossible for them to pull any sort of meaningful audience.

When I did the final number crunch, the results show we’re a long way off from a television service that accurately reflects us.

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Note: This is not a foolproof or airtight survey by any means. In the absence of any sort of research grant, I used any available cast lists, some background knowledge, a bit of guess work, but mostly basic observation. The margin for error is likely pretty high. And within that margin lies Dai Henwood.

(Confession: I’ve spent the last 10 years in some sort of parallel universe thinking Dai Henwood is half-Japanese. It turns out – to no one’s surprise but mine – that he isn’t. At all.)

My Dai race-dar was completely off. But the absence of a Japanese Dai Henwood exposed a great gaping hole in our television service. An Asian male-sized hole. This hole is not the only one, of course: it sits neatly alongside the Women of a Certain Age-sized hole and People with Disabilities-sized hole. But if you’re a male of North, South, East, West, in fact any Asian descent, your only TV appearance is likely to on Border Patrol. And the representation of Asian females is only slightly better.

But maybe it was just a bad month. Maybe there were some more Asian males floating around in some off-peak time slots.

I watched more TV, searching for any sign of that great endangered species, The New Zealand Asian male. But no. From a pool of 150, my survey had just two Asian dudes, both news reporters. No Asians of either gender on Shortland Street even – which, as a New Zealand hospital, should be swimming with doctors and nurses of Chinese and Indian descent.

This was shaping up as one of the great mysteries of the modern world, “Where Have all the Asian Men gone?”. Right up there with “Why do cheerleaders still exist?”

Like any frustrated statistician, I took the issue to Facebook: “Can you guys think of an Asian male on NZ TV?”

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And I texted some friends….

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I cast the net far and wide, I asked random waiters at restaurants and cafés, I asked my hairdresser, I asked people in the supermarket queue, I asked my mum.

And still, overwhelmingly:

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Now I love Raybon. His Herald column is the highlight of my week. But he hasn’t been on TV in a long, long time (although I’m currently campaigning for his return to our screens). It’s not fair he should be bearing this weighty flag alone – especially since he doesn’t actually bear it at all.

I asked Raybon if he was being paid a retainer for his role as the Face of All Asian men. “I’m not”, he said “Or at least that’s what I tell the tax authorities in Panama.” And then he told me a very funny joke about why there are no Asians on Shortland St.

At the end of the day though, television is a business. And in the absence of a state broadcaster, does television really have a responsibility to make diversity a priority? I mused this over a cup of tea with former-TV executive and television commentator Irene Gardiner. “Yes, I think they do,” she said, “and I think the networks feel a social responsibility to. If they are lacking in some area I don’t think it’s purposeful, they are not wilfully excluding groups.” But Gardiner agreed that the lack of Asian and Indian faces and voices was something that needed addressing. “Sometimes those of us that make television need to be alerted to the gaps, it’s very easy just to do what’s always been done, but we need to keep these sort of things front of mind”.

Of course TV is not the centre of our world like it once was. But it is still a national meeting place of sorts, a Town Square in our little village called New Zealand. And if you’re locked out of the Town Square, it is very difficult to feel part of the village. Idris Elba, long-time campaigner for more and better roles for minorities, made a plea to the UK parliament last year.

“As a kid I didn’t see myself on TV,” he said, “so I decided to become TV.” That’s inspirational, but there are very few kids who have the tenacity and talent (and ultimately, luck) of Elba. He was able to see the problem was not with him but with the system. The majority of children who don’t see themselves on TV, interpret that as “I’m not good enough to be on TV”, and that quickly gets abbreviated to “I’m not good enough”.

Allow me to take a historical detour. In 1981 my family bought our first television set. It was a second hand B&W 16 inch with rabbit ears. The ‘black’ part of the ‘black and white’ was largely redundant because – apart from Billy T James and Manu from Playschool – things were very light on the dark side. New Zealand in the early ‘80s was at peak cultural cringe. We weren’t comfortable even hearing our own accents on TV, let alone celebrating our uniqueness or telling our own stories in any meaningful way. The country nearly lost its mind when Te Karere started as a four minute broadcast in 1982. Imagine, “middle New Zealand” expected to sit through four minutes of Māori language!?! Television was Pākehā property and I was a half-Zimbabwean kid who desperately wanted to have white skin and blonde hair like my Mum, my Barbie, and Penelope the Weather Lady.

When kids at primary school asked “do you have Māori in you?” I said “yes”, as I thought this made me semi-acceptable (Manu from Playschool was definitely no Barbie, but she was a TV star). But that backfired when a big kid stopped me in the street on the way to school and told me to “piss off back to Māoriland”. (I did piss off. Not back to Māoriland but back home, in tears, to my mum.)

Feeling “other” is demoralising and confusing. Sure, as you grow up you hopefully learn to feel comfortable in your own skin, even proud to be a bit different. But in my experience, a lingering hangover remains. Way deep in the marrow of my half-caste bones I still feel I have to work extra hard and be extra nice to be good enough.

Of course things have come a long way in TV since 1981. We’ve grown up and got over ourselves, and our little melting pot of a nation is certainly better represented on our screens. But we’re still not there.

Could the problem lie in a lack of available or interested talent? Not according to a former actors agent. “I always had so much interest from Asian and Indian people wanting to pursue TV work but I had to be upfront with them at the beginning that they had a ‘unique’ look and castings would be very sporadic. The castings I did get for these ethnicities were always typecast and I felt uncomfortable briefing them on this.”

Chris Chang – rising star at ONE News and Jonas brother lookalike – is keen for more Chinese to join the newsroom ranks. “It would mean we’re more in touch with our country. Auckland, for instance, isn’t a Pākehā city, so why would we only have Pākehā reporters telling its people’s stories? Like it or not, people are drawn to those who have similar backgrounds/upbringings. You’re more likely to get a story out of someone who’s comfortable with you and can relate on some level.”

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TVNZ’s Chris Chang is one of only a handful of Asian faces regularly appearing on our screens

But Chris’s graduating class from Journalism school was lean on minorities – he recalls one Māori and one other Chinese student and the rest were Pākehā. It takes extra work for news bosses to recruit diverse talent when it’s not readily available. But surely it’s worth the work.

I understand there are people who walk around not thinking about this sort of thing. And that’s understandable: our brains are hard-wired to believe that the status quo must be that way for a reason, which makes it acceptable. If you’re not looking for an absence you’re not going to see it. One would hope though that once a gap is pointed out, a fair-minded person would be surprised, shocked even.

But not everyone is. I was told “there are only so many jobs in TV,” which seems a poor excuse for locking a huge chunk of our population out. Worse was to come. “Indians don’t even watch our TV.” Then “Chinese don’t want to be on TV, they’re too busy buying our houses.”

And therein lies the root of the problem. The job of TV is to reflect our culture, and our culture has a hot racist streak running through it which is aimed, not exclusively, but very heavily at people of Asian descent. And while this has great ramifications throughout our society, our screens have a proven ability to educate and heal. They’ve helped show a vision of a society which includes more (but still not enough) Māori and Pacific faces. But Asian representation remains stubbornly slow to keep up with the census.

Perhaps this is because change is uncomfortable and takes work. As Deborah Hill Cone wrote so elegantly in her column last week. “Prejudice lingers in the subconscious so we commit the same mistakes over and over again; it takes constant vigilance to catch our often inadvertent moments of sexism or racism.”

New Zealand doesn’t look like it did 50 years ago. Back then Asian people made up 0.6% of the population. Now the figure is closer to 14% (almost 20% in Auckland) and growing all the time. The sooner we accept this and embrace it the better off we’ll all be. Because this casual racism has a toll.

A couple of weeks ago, the Herald printed a letter from an anonymous NZ/Chinese teenager. A kid who no longer feels welcome in this country. We should feel a deep sense of shame when we hear stories like this. Until our attitudes change, New Zealand kids will continue to feel bad about themselves and minorities will continue to be a footnote on TV. The industry is funded by all of us with tens of millions of dollars a year, yet as of today appears to be doing a very poor job of showing our true diversity.

It’s not easy to change our way of thinking, and it’s certainly not comfortable. But it is crucial if everyone is to feel part of the New Zealand story.

African-American producer Shonda Rhimes put it eloquently. “The goal is that everyone should get to turn on the TV and see someone who looks like them and loves like them. And just as important, everyone should turn on the TV and see someone who doesn’t look like them and love like them,” she said “because, perhaps then, they will learn from them”.


Next week: While televised diversity is literally the faces of the people on TV, fair representation means much more than that. Several recent hit shows have shown the pathway for authentic and successful television is diversity across the board – from casting and stories, to writers and producers. In New Zealand this idea is a mainstay of our film industry, so why is this not true for the small screen?

Keep going!
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PoliticsMay 17, 2016

Influencers, inventors and international relations: on the ground at the Tripartite Economic Summit

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It sounds like a bureaucratic bore, but Auckland’s Tripartite Economic Summit, with guests including a British YouTube superstar and an American political “rock star”, is the hottest ticket in town. Tim Murphy reports from day one.

YouTuber Tom Cassell – who is globally famous as Syndicate Tom – has been walking and talking around Auckland, filming himself on his iPhone between 50 and 100 times a day.

He then edits his life, documented like this every day, down to 10 minutes and broadcasts it to 2 million subscribers.

That’s his personal account, called Syndicate Central. His main one – Syndicate Project, which is for gamers – has 10 million subscribers. At 22, Tom routinely ‘influences’ almost triple the population of New Zealand. He has an estimated net worth of $NZ6 million.

“I make videos, put them on YouTube and for some reason people watch them,” he says while posing for a selfie at the Viaduct in Auckland.

YouTube star Tom Cassell, his business partner Angelo Pullen and the writer selfied by an expert at the Viaduct .
YouTube star Tom Cassell, his business partner Angelo Pullen and the writer selfied by an expert at the Viaduct .

Yesterday Cassell, from Manchester via a technology business deal in Los Angeles, was one of the star influencers at the big Auckland-LA-Guangzhou summit at the harbour’s edge. It has a heavy-duty name, The Tripartite Economic Summit 2016, but it is loaded with techs, creatives, inventors and thinkers from here and the two international markets.

It is an 800-person extravaganza. The registrations well outdid organisers’ highest hopes. And it was running with big names, although few would have been as big beyond the conference walls as our man Tom.

The theme is “Making Connections” and aims at business and trade links, investment and jobs for the three cities. Cassell has been making connections everywhere he turns in Auckland.

At Auckland Airport, he encountered a backpacker who stopped, pulled down part of his shirt and showed Tom a tattoo of Syndicate’s logo (a lion) and motto (Life’s too short, make the most of it). “That was awesome”.

Then, walking to the venue through downtown Auckland yesterday, a high-rise window washer called down from his platform “Gidday Tom” revealing that he, too, followed the daily video log (vlog).

Cassell is here as a symbol for the possibilities in technology and marketing, for the benefits of collaboration and as evidence that the ordinary can have just as much appeal as the extraordinary.

3Blackdot, the Los Angeles technology company he runs with American business partner Angelo Pullen, links big global brands with Cassell and 21 other YouTubers. It is, says Pullen, a “very low-overhead endeavour”. People like Cassell keep on doing their thing with a major brand coming on for the ride.

“It is not about how exceptional someone like he is. It’s about how accessible he is. He’s a very common guy and that’s not to be disrespectful.”

Having started posting to YouTube with his dad’s camera as a 17 year-old, Cassell still sounds disbelieving about what’s happened to him. “I play video games and I travel the world. I went with Microsoft to Russia – I flew First Class! – and there were 1.7 million views of me just flying on an airplane. It was ridiculous.”

The Microsoft gig was to Siberia to publicise the new Tomb Raider game, giving an influencer the real Raider experience.

He’s happy to tell the Kiwi, Chinese and American delegates of the reach and potential of a communications genre few would recognise. Except through their kids: for teens, YouTube can be their dominant online experience.

Cassell, who as @Prosyndicate has 2.1 million Twitter followers, entertained that audience with praise of New Zealanders, tales of being driven around in Kim Dotcom’s car and his interactions with the “coolest mayor in the world” – Los Angeles’ Eric Garcetti.

The Tripartite Summit is, after all, about making connections. And it’s about scale. With China in the room, how could it not be? It has a delegation of 60 from Guangzhou, China’s third largest region at 14 million people. Then you have Mayor Garcetti’s business and creative delegation representing the 10 million from the West Coast super city.

Auckland might seem the odd man out, but the three-way alliance signed two years ago in Guangzhou and cemented in L.A last year seems thoroughly egalitarian and a rosy spirit of friendship was evident yesterday.

It may be that, as is often the case, the wee Kiwi is the middle man. The broker of a better relationship between two of its friends.

But why not? This is no lightweight junket. People are talking and meaning business. Mayor Garcetti, a charmer who is routinely labelled a “rock star” by other speakers, is a big name. So is the senior emissary from China, Madame Li Xiaolin. According to host mayor Len Brown, she is not only a close friend of China’s President Xi Xinping but also daughter of former Premier Li Peng, who was in office at the time of the Tiananmen protests and crackdown in 1989.

Guangdong City’s mayor couldn’t make it but Madame Li labels his stand-in, Vice Mayor Wang Dong, a “rising star politically speaking”. So he could be one to watch.

Guangzhou Vice-Mayor Wang Dong, Len Brown, and L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti
Guangzhou Vice-Mayor Wang Dong, Len Brown, and L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti

The summit opened almost poetically. Inspired perhaps by the welcome from Ngati Whatua and explanation of the hongi as “more than a pressing of noses, the bringing together of two breaths”, speakers dug deep.

Mayor Garcetti can orate. “I come from a place where the sun only kisses the Pacific when it sets, to a place where it kisses the Pacific when it both rises and sets.” And “Whether it eventually sets over the Pearl River or the California coast, we come together [beneath it] as one people.”

Sir Pita Sharples welcomed the manuhiri (visitors) by citing the ancient bond of the godwit migrating from the Yellow River to New Zealand in one 8-day flight. He recalled a statue at Parliament of the bird, inscribed with “I am the dreams of the people. The length of my flights depends on the wisdom of your decisions.”

In all tongues the spirit was lyrical. Len Brown invoked Chinese fraternal imagery. He, the eldest, was the big brother of the three mayors. Wang the middle one and Garcetti the youngster. “And I want to acknowledge Madame Li as our sister.”

If it all sounded a bit saccharine, it didn’t tip over into wanton sentimentality. Madame Li, whose main job is as chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, threw in a Chinese proverb: “True friendship exists only where there’s an abiding commitment to share common goals.”

China has 2297 sister cities worldwide, 33 within New Zealand and 257 with US cities and states. Such relationships can easily be dismissed as window dressing. The Tripartite allies were having none of that. Garcetti said: “L.A is home to the most Chinese in the US and the most New Zealanders in the US. We like to think of ourselves as a great Chinese city and a great New Zealand city.”

Despite just one percent of its business being in exporting, Los Angeles is the trade capital of the US. “Cities” Garcetti said, “are where national promises turn into local progress.”

A major focus of yesterday was the Māori‎ economy and the potential for international links and markets. Sessions on the subject were over-subscribed from visiting nations.

Maori Affairs Minister Te Ururoa Flavell outlined the $40 billion Maori economy, with 40 percent of the land for export forests, 40 percent of fish quota, 12 percent of sheep and been units, 10 percent of kiwifruit and 5 percent of dairy.

“But we want to hear from your heart. We don’t want to hear just slick words. No connection to your heart? No deal, or it will be doomed from the start.”

Mr Brown had an ebullient day. Certainty of his October retirement seemed to relax him into hosting with the kidding, roaring laughs and singing Len of old. It could possibly be his last big stand on the international stage wearing the mayoral chains and he reclaimed the title “The Singing Mayor”. Urging the Kiwis present to join him in “Pokarekare Ana”, he told his guests:

“This is a love song and today we share our love and passion.”

Meanwhile Tom ‘Syndicate’ Cassell will be posting some time about now on his life yesterday among the mayors and diplomats and suits and Kiwis and Yanks and Chinese. He’ll be talking to more people than will read all the mainstream media in New Zealand today.

Smile, Auckland, for the camera.

This report was commissioned in association with conference organiser ATEED (Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development). The summit continues today.

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