Waleed Aly’s complaint at Logies about TV racism erases the true trailblazers

THERE’S a history of diversity on Australian TV and for Waleed Aly and his fans to claim he’s breaking new ground is absurd, writes Andrew Bolt.

WAS there anything more ludicrous than seeing Waleed Aly complaining last weekend about racism even after he was given the Gold Logie for Best Personality on TV?

Was there anything sillier than seeing Noni Hazelhurst likewise complaining last weekend about women not getting a fair go at the very moment that she was inducted into the Logies Hall of Fame?

Please, children are watching. Wouldn’t a “thank you” rather than a “stuff you” not have set a better example?

And wouldn’t a tribute to Australia have been more appropriate than all this childish displaying of wounds that seem to be not even the barest of scratches?

Instead, we were treated to something Kafkaesque on Logies night, where tales were told of Australia’s allegedly inherent racism and sexism at an event that at every turn contradicted that fashionable smear, so wildly applauded by the audience.

Take Aly’s acceptance speech. By any measure, Aly has succeeded so completely in this country that he is a walking contradiction of claims that Muslims or people from Middle Eastern families are invariably the oppressed.

Instead, our institutions have rushed to embrace and sanctify this man who seemed the moderate and unthreatening Muslim of their dreams — a man who allowed them to prove their own broad-mindedness at minimal risk and to ignore the explosions, gunfire and screams of “Allahu akbar” on the TV news.

A grateful Labor government appointed Aly to the board of the Australia Council. The ABC, committed to every kind of diversity except diversity of thought, signed up this preacher of Leftist pieties and Islamic apologetics as an on-air presenter. An eager Monash University made him a lecturer at its Global Terrorism Research Centre, even though he had not even completed a PhD.

Gold Logie award winner Waleed Aly has complained about racism.

The Age made him a columnist, Channel 10 made him a host of The Project and the Australian government sent him on a tour of the Middle East.

The journalist union’s Walkley Awards even handed him a prize for his columns and a portrait of Aly as a kind of Christ, blood dripping from his noble head, was a finalist for the Archibald Prize for portraiture.

No one can have been showered with so much by so many so soon — and so clearly while being so different.

Yet Aly in his speech still wouldn’t take yes, yes, yes for an answer. He instead attacked the TV industry for not being welcoming enough to Muslims, ethnics and people with funny names. You know, to people just like Waleed Aly.

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“If tonight means anything, it’s that the Australian public, our audience — as far as they are concerned there is absolutely no reason why that can’t change,” he said, clutching his Logie.

And then he told the most astonishingly far-fetched tale of oppression, announcing that ethnic actors had seen in him their representative, even their hero, and had urged him to win the Logie for them.

“Someone who is in this room — and I’m not going to use the name they use in the industry — came up to me, introduced themselves and said to me, ‘I really hope you win. My name is Mustafa. But I can’t use that name because I won’t get a job’.”

How sad. But how suss. It soon turned out that this actor too scared to reveal his Middle Eastern first name was Tyler De Nawi, who still kept and traded under his Middle Eastern surname without any trouble.

Even stranger, De Nawi had just starred in the Channel 9’s prime-time hit TV show, Here Come the Habibs, playing someone from a Lebanese background just like his own.

Ernie Dingo on Channel 7's Getaway program.

SBS news reader Lee Lin Chin.

Exactly what did Aly think De Nawi was hiding? If De Nawi thought he had to keep his Lebanese background secret to succeed, he was going about it in a hell of a strange way. But on Aly ploughed, saying an actor called “Dimitri” had also urged him to win.

“To Dimitri and Mustafa and to everyone else with an unpronounceable name like I don’t know, I really just want to say one thing and it’s that I am incredibly humbled that you would even think to invest in me that way,” he sighed.

Please. A man with an even more allegedly “unpronounceable” name than Dimitri — Alex Dimitriades — had already just won the Logie for the Most Outstanding Actor.

And Deborah Mailman, of Aboriginal ancestry, had won Most Outstanding Actress, showing that honouring people of different colour and “race” is not quite the Aly-specific Big Deal in this exceptionally embracing country.

That is the real shame of this Aly schtick — that by presenting himself as the great challenger of our racism he wipes out the abundant history we have of people who did that challenging long ago and helped to create the kind of country where an Aly effortlessly cleans up big-time.

Am I too harsh?

Then consider how Aly’s wife, Muslim convert Susan Carland, herself given a lecturer’s job by Monash University and a gig by ABC radio, has presented her husband as the shining first to challenge a colour-phobic TV industry.

As The Australian reported in a generous profile of Aly last month: “Aly’s wife, academic Susan Carland, points out the significance of having a non-white face on commercial TV.

“ ‘I think a lot of people forget that — he’s the first non-white on prime-time commercial TV. That’s huge,’ she says, later sending me a text to correct herself: ‘PS, Waleed told me apparently Ernie Dingo hosted something on commercial TV back in the day’.”

Strange how a couple who have apparently discussed Aly’s great significance could only just remember Aboriginal Ernie Dingo — who merely hosted “something on commercial TV — and no one else.

Current affairs host Stan Grant.

It appears that so many others who went before have been wiped from their memories, including Aboriginal current affairs host Stan Grant, Sri Lankan entertainer Kamahl, exercise guru Swami Sarasvati, Aboriginal presenter Aaron Pedersen of Gladiators Australia, the much-loved African American singer Marcia Hines and Bellbird’s Bob Maza, whose Hall of Fame entry hails him for having “changed the way indigenous people were portrayed in the media”.

Also wiped from this Aly-Was-First history are Big Brother’s Trevor Butler, MasterChef’s Poh Ling Yeow and Adam Liaw and Australian Idol’s Casey Donovan.

And, while Carland limited Aly’s exceptionalism to commercial TV, surely the ABC’s Trisha Goddard and the SBS’s Lee Lin Chin deserve some acknowledgment?

The truth is that whatever the flaws of Australia’s past, Aly is by no means the exception or the saviour by which we will be saved from the sin of our alleged racism.

He instead slots easily into a long tradition of Australians embracing people of all backgrounds who make an effort to join.

It is this version of Australia that should be taught — an affirmation of Australia’s warm heart, not a damnation of its imagined evil.

So next time let’s have a Logies winner admit they are not a victim but a winner in a society from which they so richly profit.