Robbie Magasiva playing Dr Avia on TV2’s Shortland Street. (Photo by Siobhan Keogh.)

Pacific Islanders are better represented on New Zealand television than at any other time over the past two decades. Many talented actors are hitting the top, but are the roles portrayed actually good as models?

Pacific Scoop:
Report – By Siobhan Keogh.

Maxwell Avia struts around the emergency department of a fictional hospital. He’s an intelligent, friendly, well-spoken Samoan doctor and one of the few Pacific Island faces on mainstream New Zealand television.

Shortland Street’s Dr Avia, played by Robbie Magasiva, is also a gambling addict who let his addiction destroy his family.

Pacific Islanders are better represented on New Zealand television than they ever have been before. In New Zealand we have a wealth of talented people who feature not only in dramas like Shortland Street and Outrageous Fortune, but also in comedies like bro’ Town and in television journalism.

Census data from 2006 shows that 6.9 percent of New Zealanders identify as Pacific people, making them the third biggest ethnic group in the country.

While the mere presence of Pacific faces on New Zealand is a huge improvement on 20 years ago, many Pacific Islanders who work in TV and in the media believe there is still a long way to go before they are adequately represented.

A drama teacher at the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts, Edward Peni, says that while the volume of roles available in mainstream television has kept on expanding, he still does not think there are many good role models on the small screen for young people.

“Maxwell Avia is a Samoan doctor with a gambling problem,” scoffs Peni.

Gambling problem

Gambling, Peni acknowledges, is a significant problem in the Pacific community in New Zealand, but he does not appreciate it being exploited for drama: “It’s a social issue that they need to address,” he says. “I’m just a bit tired of it.”

Sandra Kailahi, secretary of the Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA), also feels some discomfort with the way Pacific Island stereotypes are played out in TV dramas.

“Shortland Street’s always been good at representing Polynesian heritage. I don’t know if that’s good enough,” she says. “On the one hand [the gambling storyline] is stereotypical, but on the other hand we know it’s true.”

‘Normalising people’

However the deputy editor of Spasifik magazine, Qiane Corfield-Matata, says people just “read into things a bit too much”.

“Shortland Street does a really good job of normalising different groups of people,” she says.

Corfield-Matata says a recent scene in which Dr Avia was arrested for “being brown and wearing a hoodie” was particularly good.

“My partner is Tongan and he sometimes gets a few strange looks on the street. It’s a reflection of New Zealand’s makeup at the moment,” she says. “And it is just a soap opera.”

Peni says many writers for New Zealand television shows have “no identification” with Pacific people.

However, Kailahi says Samoan script writer Victor Rodger worked on Shortland Street to develop Maxwell Avia’s character: “I know that some Palagi script writers don’t want to go down that road,” she says.

Popular New Zealand drama Outrageous Fortune features comedian David Fane as Falani, a character described as “a fine upstanding member of West Auckland’s criminal fraternity” by the show’s website.

Positive character

Falani’s character is by no means the only criminal on the show, but Peni would still like to see something different: “What I have seen of that character – it is that typical Samoan connotation,” he says. “That thug stereotype is old hat.”

But one of the writers for Outrageous Fortune, Rachel Lang, believes that Falani is actually one of the more positive characters on the show.

“He’s a positive character because he’s successful, he has wide family connections, a wide social circle, and he gets the best of everyone around him,” she says.

Lang admits that there are some stereotypes around his character, like his overbearing wife and his connection to his church, but Falani “takes the piss” out of these cliches.

But Peni says David Fane’s character lacks real depth: “As a Samoan we’re quite well-known for our sense of humour,” he says. “But there’s quite a lot more depth than that.”

Role models

While some New Zealand drama may not have a lot of truly positive role models, they do exist on television news.

“It’s probably the best it’s been in a long time,” Kailahi says.

Shows like Tagata Pasifika have given Pacific Islanders in New Zealand a voice as well as an alternative news source.

Taualeo’o Stephen Stehlin, executive producer for the show, said in the Pacific Journalism Review in 2009 that “the standing joke for Māori and Pacific people used to be that the only time we ever saw ourselves were on shows like Crime Watch.”

Now Stehlin says there are more Pacific voices on television than ever before because of Freeview offering new alternatives. He argues that it gives Pacific Islanders more of a chance to tell their own stories.

Spasifik spokesperson Corfield-Matata says it’s important that Pacific people get to report on their own issues: “We could have different angles to stories, we can sometimes talk to different people and get a different take,” she says.

Career starts

Television New Zealand’s Pacific correspondent, Barbara Dreaver, credits Tagata Pasifika with helping to develop Pacific peoples’ careers in journalism.

However, she also expresses some concern that Pacific Islanders are still not well-represented in mainstream news.

PIMA’s Sandra Kailahi says that despite all of the issues surrounding Pacific representation and television, things have improved – and will keep improving: “It’s better than it was, but it can always be better,” she says.

Edward Peni shares this view. He says he expects to see more Pacific people on TV in the next year or so.

Siobhan Keogh is a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies student on the Asia-Pacific Journalism course at AUT University.