Gossip Queen: Anjali Rao blames lack of diversity in commercial TV for death of her career
News anchor Anjali Rao says that after seven years living in Australia she has been unable to land a full-time role on a commercial TV network, and she blames her accent and her skin colour.
Fiona Byrne
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News anchor Anjali Rao has slammed Australian commercial TV’s lack of cultural diversity, claiming it has killed her media career.
Rao moved to Melbourne in 2012 after working at Sky News and Channel 5 in the UK and five years as a news anchor with CNN International.
In the seven years she has been here she has been unable to land a full-time role on a commercial network because, she says, of her accent and skin colour.
She says she was regularly told: “There is always SBS.”
Rao, 45, said: “I am Australian but because I don’t have an Aussie accent and also I am a woman of colour, it has been very hard, extremely hard, in this country for me. It basically killed my career.
“People like SBS and Channel 10 have been really good to me and I can’t thank them enough. But Australian TV, as we all know, is just not representative of the social make-up of this country. The people in charge do not care and they are quite open about it.”
Born in Hong Kong and educated in England, Rao’s mother was Australian and her father Indian.
She said it was disappointing her international experience stood for nothing here.
“I have been told many times, ‘I think viewers would find your accent confusing’,” she said.
“If I lived in the UK or the US then I would be absolutely fine because you switch on a TV over there and there is every kind of skin colour, there is every kind of accent. There are all sorts of regional dialects but here you just have this uniform way of sounding.
“It is not representative of the demographic of what Australia is culturally, but you just have to roll with the punches.”
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While her media career has slowed, Rao has worked on SBS’s Dateline and appeared on The Project and Studio 10.
She now travels the world as an in-demand event MC.
Rao said she was delighted to be an ambassador for Worksafe’s Health and Safety Month of October, which aims to raise awareness about workplace practices and behaviour.
“People do have to be reminded quite frequently, as far as workplaces are concerned, what their obligations are to their staff. It is beneficial all round,” she said.