So Waleed won. There are people who are still not happy. Attacks on him continued but then he won, so those attacks are really irrelevant. The thing is some people said that his win is a big deal because of racial correctness and it shouldn’t be an issue at this day and age. But what is ironic is that people who claimed that mostly belong to people who still hold dear that Australia is a white Anglo and western country and so the media should reflect this.
Does political and racial correctness exist? Yes it does but then when we are living in a society that is thriving on diversity, the same diversity will inevitably become an issue. Yes Waleed won. Yes he is different. But when the difference made a difference it became a different issue. The fact that certain sectors of the media and our society are so up in arms against Waleed and Lee Lin Chin reflected this part of the society is still fighting the change. It is sad but then at the same time it is encouraging. This is because our society has moved from not-acknowledging the need for change to now acknowledging the change and then moving towards resisting and attacking the change. Noni Hazelhurst nailed this at her acceptance speech for the night – the good thing about glacier is that you either ride on it or you got overrun by it.
I have worked with a number of younger generation producers and writers and for them ethnicity is not any issue for they see characters as, well characters. So TV personalities are, well just TV personalities. The thing with the Gold Logie was that it is a gong nominated and selected by the audience – the audience who are still watching TV. The fact that both Waleed and Lee were nominated means they resonate with the audience in such a way that they reflected the acceptance of TV personalities as who they are. Some of the resisting fractions attack the nominations by pointing out their programs are not that great and popular, so they should not be nominated. However the other ironic aspect of this argument was that Carrie Bickmore who was also nominated was Waleed Aly’s co-host on The Project, but nobody seemed to give a thing about it. So are the attacks about the popularity of the show or are they about something else?
During all the attacks in the foray it seemed that people have forgotten about something – yes Waleed is not white, yes Waleed is a Muslim but also yes Waleed was born and bred in Australia, and yes Waleed was educated in a Christian school. He is as Australian as any of those white hard heads who are trying to hit him like Juggernauts. Like a lot of Australian kids who went to Christian schools he just did not get converted to Christianity but stayed with his parents’ faith.
Waleed’s win both matters and does not matter. It matters because it represents a change of preference of the audience. So many a time I was told the Australian audience is not ready to accept non-Anglo characters as leads in shows (I was even told by a producer to write out or dump down non-Anglo leads in a series that he thought was good but too non-White) but Waleed and Lee’s nominations is a reality check that those recycled arguments are no longer valid – and yes the audience had changed – not just ready for a change but had changed. And this is an ideological battle beaten by reality. It also does not matter because this is already the world we are living in so the television landscape is just catching up whether the power holders like it or not. With the competition from streaming services such as Netflix, the Australian audience have more choices and can switch off on programs they don’t relate to anymore. So the choice for the television industry in Australia is either to go with the flow or as Noni Hazelhurst said get overrun by the glacier.
Am I excited about this change we saw last night? I must say I am just cautiously optimistic as when a difference start to make a difference people in power will do whatever they can to put them down. Star Wars and Hunger Games might be fictional but they did portray people in power in quite accurate ways. These people will do whatever they can in their power to “fix the problem” even deep down they know it is a change not a problem. But who would want to surrender what they believe they have built and yield to the newer and younger generation?
Waleed’s win and Lee’s nomination are pivotal because they were nominated for who they are and not caricatures of where they belong to. For me this is extremely important as a practitioner in the media landscape because this represents the recognition of what is being done instead of where they came from. The likes of Andrew Bolt who argued on the grounds of political correctness gone mad are in my opinion nothing but patronising as I firmly believe you are in no position to talk about the need for non-racial-correctness if you are not a person who had experienced it.
Waleed’s win and Lee’s nomination are also results of hard work being recognised by a changed audience demography. People who said otherwise are irrelevant as they know they are becoming more and more irrelevant as time passes. They won’t be shut down but then when their voices truly become irrelevant, this debate will truly become irrelevant because then truly there is no need to talk about it anymore.
