No room for Greens senator in refugee doco

SBS has rejected an offer from a Greens senator to take part in its asylum-seeker documentary Go Back To Where You Came From.

Sarah Hanson-Young

SBS has rejected an offer from Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young to take part in its asylum-seeker documentary Go Back To Where You Came From.

The network said Senator Hanson-Young, who made it to the shortlist of applicants to appear in a new series retracing in reverse the journeys taken by refugees to reach Australia, would not feature in the program, which was a ratings and critical hit for the multicultural network last year.

For the second series SBS is expanding and revamping the program, which attracted some of the network's biggest audiences last year.

It plans to film some sequences on Christmas Island next month but final decisions have not been made.

Senator Hanson-Young, 30, declined to comment yesterday, but The Australian has been told producers asked her to submit an "expression of interest" to the program's producers.

She stipulated in it that she could not appear in the documentary if filming clashed with parliamentary sitting weeks.

But SBS confirmed yesterday that it had decided not to feature the media-savvy senator from South Australia, who was the youngest person ever elected to the Senate.

"Sarah Hanson-Young is not a participant in the second series," a spokeswoman said.

"The series is currently in pre-production and no details of the participants, or the locations they will be visiting, are currently confirmed."

A producer from Cordell Jigsaw, the company which makes the program for SBS, refused to confirm if producers scouted around Christmas Island for locations last month and had hoped to cast a local resident angry about the effects on island life of the massive detention centre there.

The first series of Go Back To Where You Came From, which featured six Australians from a range of backgrounds travelling to Malaysia, Kenya and Iraq, was a ratings success for the network.

Its audience grew with each episode and it was the No 1 trending topic on Twitter on its first night. The documentary was featured in The New York Times and fans included former News Limited chief executive John Hartigan, who nominated it as his favourite program of the year.