Journalist, author and professor, Stan Grant has delivered a speech at the Australian National University, expressing his disappointment in the referendum’s result and the “cold-hearted” no vote.
“Our nation is set in stone: one word, no,” Grant said in his speech, titled The Witness of Poetry. “Whatever hope there may be for a different Australia, I likely won’t live to see it.”
“This morning I am hearing that word: no. That word without love. That word of rejection. That word from which no other word can come. This morning in the darkness I am hearing the cold-hearted no of a country so comfortable it need not care.”
Grant’s speech at the ANU’s Crawford Leadership Forum was delivered on Monday night, just weeks after the majority of Australians voted no in the referendum on the Voice to Parliament.
In the address, Grant, a Wiradjuri man, questioned the notion that the Voice to Parliament was a “modest ask”, a line pushed repeatedly by the Prime Minister and the Yes campaign before the referendum.
“The Voice was never a modest ask, it was monumental. Perhaps this was the opportunity lost by the Yes campaign, to not let the Voice truly speak,” Grant said.
“Instead it was shushed. Shrunk small enough to fit into politics.
“In the consultants’ suites and the lawyers’ dens, it was determined that if the voice was made so inoffensive people may say yes. Instead it was so inoffensive people found it so easy to say no.”
Although he didn’t mention her by name, Grant appeared to reference comments that had been made by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a leader of the ‘No’ campaign.
“The victorious politician who says this no vote puts an end to the politics of grievance and in a pithy, media-tested, inane sentence the hurt of my parents, my grandparents, the early deaths, the youth suicides, the lives lost to imprisonment, the snotty noses, itchy skin, and dazed look of another generation of inherited trauma – the solemn truth of what a nation has done to the First People – is waved away as mere contrivance. A collective gripe,” he said.
“But the politician is so devastatingly convincing. The politician has no tolerance for history, pain is negated by progress.”
In May this year, Grant stepped away from his role as a host of the ABC’s Q&A program. At the time, he noted the “relentless racial filth” he had faced, and said that since his appearance on a panel during the King’s coronation, he has seen “people in the media lie and distort my words”. He said he needed a break from the media.
Grant is now the director of Monash University’s Constructive Institute Asia Pacific, a centre focused on rebuilding media integrity.