ABC “Insiders” Program Has Pretty Much Been All “White” For A Decade

If you are an Aussie of colour and enjoy follow politics, your Sunday morning is usually all about “Insiders” – where political journalists join a panel each week to discuss the highs and lows of Australian politics for the week. There is also usually a politician who gets the hot seat to be interviewed by the host. But one thing you may have noticed is how ‘white’ the show is in terms of the host and the political journalists they get on the panels. But really is this surprising? I mean, Australian TV has a reputation for decades for just showcasing white people because essentially it is still a racially incompetent country. But there are some changes with shows and news programs, but fact remains – ABC “Insiders” is still white and that is disappointing coming from ABC, which is meant to promote cultural diversity in its programming.

Junkee Media journalist Rob Stott actually did research on this by going through the ABC “Insiders” program website and looking through its archives. He found that for the past decade “Insiders” have not had a host or panelists who were non-white. It acknowledges that there have been a handful of people who the show has interviewed who have been non-white, but those panelists sitting on the comfy couch of the program has all been “white”.

“Consistent with our previous reporting, which you can read below, a small number of people of colour have been interviewed on the show over the years, but it appears none have sat on the panel. Certainly, there have been no people of colour as regular panellists in at least the last 15 years.”

“The publicly available archives are patchy between 2005 and 2010, and there are no archives available before 2005, so it’s impossible to be certain, but an ABC spokesperson was unable to nominate a single person of colour who had appeared on the Insiders panel in the show’s history.”

An ABC spokesperson has told Junkee Media that this week’s panel will feature former ABC Indigenous Affairs reporter Bridget Brennan, who is a proud Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta woman. Let’s hope this is not a tokenistic thing but something which will happen more often on the show. As an Australian political buff, I want to see other political journalists of colour on this program and the excuse that “there is none” is no longer an excuse because there are many which could be sitting on that couch.

To read the original article, please click on: ABC’s ‘Insiders’ Has Not Had A Person Of Colour On Its Panel In At Least A Decade