The NZ-on-Air Diversity Report for 2021 acknowledges that Asians are “consistently under-represented” in the audio-visual media in New Zealand.
The survey covered the number of Asians involved in the roles of producers, directors and writers.
Asians engaged as producers stood at seven percent, directors at 6.1 percent and writers at 11 percent. While these figures represent an upward trend since 2016 when the survey began, this representation is not proportionate to the total number of Asians who make up 15 percent of the population of New Zealand. Asian representation in these roles is still low in proportion to the overall population.
Europeans tend to dominate in these roles, followed by Maori and Pacific Peoples, with Asians trailing far behind. The least represented in these roles are Middle Eastern, Latin American and African practitioners.
In the domain of television (current affairs), Asians are practically invisible. The break-up indicates 54 percent Europeans, 26 percent Pacific Peoples, 15 percent Maori and zero per cent Asian.
Documentary productions, on the other hand, have a high volume of participation by population categories across the board, with Europeans at 76 percent, Maori at 21 percent, Pacific Peoples at seven percent, Asians at five percent and the rest at two percent.
“There is no market-driven storytelling in NZ. Most of the productions are government funded,” notes Dr. Shuchi Kothari, an assistant professor at the University of Auckland who teaches script writing with a focus on “inclusive storytelling.”
If storytelling is primarily government-funded, the key questions that arise are: What is the NZ story? Who is part of the narrative of NZ?
Asian under-representation is a systemic problem. As a demographic, Asians have been left out of the NZ narrative despite their strong numbers. The standard argument has been that not enough Asians are applying for funding. That begs the question as to why the government is not reaching out sufficiently to Asians?
However, this has been changing incrementally over the years. The establishment in NZ has started to respond to global trends, such as, for example, the Me-too Movement which boosted feminist awareness worldwide. The discourse has since shifted from gender to race, and this is reflected in the priorities currently pursued by funding agencies in NZ. As a result, Asians in the current climate feel more empowered to speak out and tell their stories. The establishment in NZ has realised it cannot be deaf to minority representation.
A strong catalyst in this process has been the high-profile overseas productions coming to NZ to make films (such as the Lord of the Rings franchise).
“We are stitched into the global economy of film making,” Kothari observes. She is a co-founder of the Pan-Asian Screen Collective, which has 800 members and works closely with NZ-on-Air to increase the number of Requests For Proposals (RFPs) from the Asian communities and achieve higher levels of Asian representation on screen. In 2008, Kothari launched New Zealand’s first prime-time TV show, A Thousand Apologies.
In the area of journalism, the Asia Media Centre, which is part of the Asia New Zealand Foundation, supports media initiatives to increase the number of Asian New Zealanders working in the local media. “We have been encouraged to see a growing number of journalists of Asian heritage and with Asian language skills in newsrooms recently,” notes Graeme Acton, Media Centre Manager.
The Asian Media Centre serves as a point of access for expertise and information on Asia and has supported more than 350 New Zealand journalists to travel to Asia since 1994.
Given that Asians constitute 15 percent of all New Zealanders, it’s fair to say that, despite the slew of initiatives rolled out in recent years, Asians are a long way from closing the gap with other communities when it comes to representation on screen and in the mainstream media.
