When Mark Scott, the outgoing ABC managing director, publicly canvassed a merger between the ABC and SBS earlier this year, he was probably unaware of the raw nerve he touched among many culturally and linguistically diverse members of Australia’s media community.

Scott’s declaration that SBS no longer needed to exist as a stand-alone entity threw the issue of diversity in Australian media into the spotlight and fed into a growing debate about access and representation. Australia has always grappled with the issue of culturally diverse representations in our media, from the self-deprecating tokenism of Nick Giannopoulos to … the self-deprecating tokenism of Paul Fenech. Shows such as Benjamin Law’s The Family Law are rare in the sense that despite featuring a diverse cast, the humour in them doesn’t derive from racial slapstick, but from more traditional situational comedy. The juxtaposition of The Family Law, on SBS, and the stereotype-heavy comedy of Here Come the Habibs, produced by Nine, reignited debate about Australia’s insular, white-bread media sector this year. Why are shows that accurately portray Australia’s diversity so much rarer than shows that create imaginary versions of inner-city Melbourne and Sydney where non-white people don’t exist? Why do the breakfast programs on the ABC, Seven, Nine and Ten exclusively feature white people? Why do our news journalists so rarely reflect the population they are reporting on?