The list of Gold Logie candidates revealed this week is the most culturally diverse in the 58-year history of Australia’s television awards.

The 2016 Gold Logie nominees are the most culturally diverse in the history of the award

In a departure from the all-white nominee lists of previous years, SBS newsreader Lee Lin Chin and The Project’s Waleed Aly are up for the top award, alongside the star of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries New Zealand-born actress Essie Davis.

Also nominated are Family Feud host Grant Denyer and former Gold Logie winners Scott Cam and Carrie Bickmore.

Lee Lin Chin’s nomination may have come as a result of her status as a cult social media star.

Her tweets, however, are not written by her, but by comedian Chris Leben, her colleague on SBS2’s The Feed.

Her nomination – along with that of Waleed Aly – suggests the television popularity contest has finally embraced the notion of diversity.

“In all my time I don’t think we’ve ever seen a list like this,” said Emma Nolan, editor of TV Week, which stages the Logies, of the past 10 years. “It’s different, in a good way – it’s diverse in terms of gender, age and background.”

The nominees in 24 categories plus the Gold were announced on Sunday afternoon at Crown in Melbourne. The awards will be held on May 8.

The 15 “most outstanding” categories are peer-voted, while the nine “best” categories and the Gold Logie are voted by members of the public.

Ms Chin is an Indonesian-born television presenter and journalist.

She is best known for her association with the SBS network and is the weekend presenter of SBS World News.

She has been a news presenter and journalist for many years.

Waleed Aly is a writer, academic, lawyer, media presenter and musician. Aly is currently a co-host of Network Ten’s news and current affairs television program The Project.

He was born in Melbourne to Egyptian parents.

He is a Sunni Muslim and was educated at Wesley College. He completed high school at Wesley in 1996, and then studied at the University of Melbourne graduating with degrees in engineering and law.

After graduating, Aly worked as an associate to Family Court judge Joseph Kay and, until, 2007 worked as a solicitor in Melbourne for Maddocks Lawyers.

In 2006, he was a pro bono lawyer with the Human Rights Law Centre, on secondment from Maddocks. In 2008, he was selected to participate in the Australia 2020 Summit.

Aly is a staff member of the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University and says that most of the conflicts in the Middle East can be traced to the arbitrary way in which its territories were divided-up by Western powers by the ongoing demand for Middle Eastern oil and more recently by factors such as the invasion of Iraq.

Laurie Nowell
AMES Australia Senior Journalist