November 4, 2025
I’ve come to love being a proud ABC (Australian Born Chinese), with all the traditions and heritage it brings. But growing up, I wanted nothing more than to be white. Everyone around me was white, in real life and on the screen. I was desperate to fit in. As a result, I learned to relate more to the background characters who never got a line than to the heroes whose faces were everywhere.
At school, I swapped out my pork floss sandwiches and Yakults for Vegemite and juice poppers. I’d nod along to references I didn’t understand and learn to laugh at jokes that didn’t include me (or even poked fun at people who looked like me). I quit the piano, rolled my eyes in maths class and rejected traditional Chinese medicine because I was scared I would smell “weird.”
At the time, I thought this discomfort was something personal. Maybe a symptom of teenage insecurity?
It took me years to realise that my self-doubt had roots beyond me. Systemic racism doesn’t always announce itself loudly but works subtly. Not through single moments of exclusion but through a steady accumulation of them. Every missing face in an ad, every flat stereotype, every untold story reinforces a quiet message: you don’t belong here. Over time, that message becomes internalised.
Growing up without representation shapes more than self-image. For many first-gen Asian Australians like myself, the absence of authentic cultural visibility in media has meant learning to edit or dilute parts of ourselves to fit into the mainstream.
Unfortunately, the industry that helped shape those images still has a long way to go.
Rolling your eyes yet? I get it, diversity fatigue is real. But if you’re tired of hearing it, imagine how tiring it is being the person who keeps having to say it.
As the industry embraces diversity, the challenge isn’t just to include Asian faces, but to portray their stories with complexity and truth. Far too often, culture is treated as an afterthought, something added at the end of a brief, once the “real” strategy is done.
But culture isn’t a layer you add at the end. Culture is the strategy.
In a country where more than half the population is either born overseas or has a parent who was, generic messaging simply doesn’t cut through. If brands want to matter, they need to move past surface-level inclusion and invest in real cultural understanding.
The truth is, you can’t make work that reflects the world if the people making it all look the same. And right now, Australia’s creative industry still looks alarmingly homogenous.
According to Advertising Council Australia’s Create Space Census, our industry remains 86% dominated by the ethnic majority (Anglo-Celtic, European and North American), with most diversity found at junior levels. Those from ethnic minority backgrounds report lower feelings of inclusion and belonging, and higher experiences of discrimination, pushing talented people out of the industry altogether.
Just 1% of respondents identified as Asian, one of the largest minority groups in the sample, and they were four times more likely to experience discrimination based on ethnicity.
When we talk about “diverse storytelling,” this is the context we have to reckon with. Because how can our work reflect the richness of modern Australia if the people creating it don’t?
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Even when we look overseas, we see that progress isn’t easy, but it is possible.
In the UK, the Media Diversity Research Centre ranks the market among the top in Europe for diversity policy and accountability. Yet even there, fewer than 20% of ads feature people from minority ethnic groups. The difference is that the UK industry acknowledges the gap and is working to close it, from inclusive hiring policies to public accountability frameworks like the All In Census, which measures representation every two years.
In the US, the numbers are far from perfect, but there’s at least visible momentum. Around 31% of people in advertising and marketing roles identify as ethnically diverse. While not yet reflective of the 42% diverse population, it’s a marked step ahead of Australia. Asian professionals make up over 10% of the US industry, and while still underrepresented, they’re not invisible.
In case you missed it earlier, Australia, by comparison, sits at 1%. So, not only are we behind, but we’re barely on the board.
These numbers matter because they reflect not only who’s being represented but who gets to represent others. It’s one thing to call for diverse storytelling, but it’s another to ensure that those stories are being told by people who understand them firsthand.
When our teams are made up of different lived experiences, ideas naturally become more layered, more human and more truthful. If the same rooms keep imagining the world, we’ll keep seeing the same stories. But when those rooms begin to reflect the people they’re speaking to (the ones who grew up feeling unseen, unheard or misunderstood), something shifts. We start to tell stories that don’t just look different but feel different.
We can’t pretend diversity is optional. Creativity in Australia will only thrive when people in the room reflect the world we’re trying to reach. We can’t afford to treat representation as a checkbox or a casting decision because it means much more than that. It’s belonging. And belonging only exists when everyone finally sees themselves fully, truthfully and unmistakably in the story.
