19 Jul 2020

Where are the Asian-Kiwi faces and voices?

From Standing Room Only, 12:36 pm on 19 July 2020

Another year, another Diversity Report on gender ethnicity balance - this time from New Zealand On Air.

The most glaring imbalance, once again, is among Asian creatives - on the small screen and also on the big one.

The good news is that the figures have gone up 300 percent on previous years. The bad news is that the figure is 9 percent - up from 2 percent of scripts in development a few years ago.

This is clearly not good enough when the population of New Zealanders who identify as Asian is over 15 percent. We wanted to find out what's going on. And why it's mostly not going on our screens.

From the Pan Asian Screen Collective, we're joined by Shuchi Kothari - film-maker, teacher and Head of the Screen Production programme at the University of Auckland. Steven Chow has been in the film and TV business here for over 20 years - as an editor and as a director... And Julie Zhu is a photographer, a writer and a theatre practitioner. And later we get the response of Amie Mills from New Zealand On Air, and TVNZ's General Manager of Local Content, Nevak Rogers.