After a three-year analysis of texts and books used by Victorian high school students, education experts from the University of Melbourne have concluded there is a marked lack of racial, sexual and gender diversity content. Researchers Alex Bacalja and Lauren Bliss found, out of 402 protagonists “78 per cent were heterosexual, 18 per cent had no identifiable sexuality and just four per cent were identifiably homosexual”.
Speaking of choosing books based on the identity of the author Mr Donnelly said “if you look at LGBTQI+ people, they are about 4-5 per cent of the population and if we go down that road we are going to have a very unbalanced, biased selection of texts". Such a strategy “will do nothing to help young people … appreciate what is so valuable about literature,” he told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “What we need is to choose literary works for their aesthetic and moral value”.
This is obvious, and should be a boring and uncontroversial thing to say.