Stan Grant: ‘I can’t believe this is who we are.’

Those are the words indigenous journalist Stan Grant used to call attention to a version of Australia he says has lost its way.

Grant was delivering a speech on Wednesday night in Sydney after winning GQ Magazine’s Agenda Setter of the Year.

He said Australia was “divided” and in danger of “retreating to old divisions”. He referenced the suicide of a 10-year-old girl as evidence that change is needed more than ever.

“I spent half of my working life overseas reporting the great stories of the world,” he told an audience at the Ivy Ballroom.

“I saw the rise of terrorism throughout the Middle East. Into the secret world of North Korea. The resurgence of China. The return of populism and nationalism and I saw division. I came back to my country a couple of years ago to be reminded that we still here are divided by our history.

Stan Grant has had enough.Source:Supplied

“I saw that with the booing of Adam Goodes. And I looked on that and I thought — ‘Is this us? Is this truly the measure of who we are? Because in Australia, 10-year-old girls commit suicide.”

Grant was referring to the tragic death of a young girl in a remote community in Western Australia in March. She was one of 19 suspected suicides in her community in the space of three months.

It’s a topic he says he can’t stop thinking about. In this month’s issue of GQ, he wrote that it was an image “I cannot cleanse from my mind, it’s seared into the darkest part of me”.

He says his own daughter grew up with opportunities and security and prosperity, things the other young girl never had because Australia is still inherently divided.

“My daughter has lived a life denied to this other little girl. They have lived in the same country, a generation apart but from totally different worlds.

Grant said he felt “a profound failure” when he learned about her story.

“We spend billions of dollars each year on indigenous programs, for what? For a little girl to surrender to misery? We can blame racism, or dispossession and colonisation, but then what?”

In his speech, the 53-year-old talked about indigenous incarceration rates and the use of a spit hood to control Alice Springs teenager Dylan Voller in March 2015.

In that incident, at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, Mr Voller was strapped into a mechanical restraint chair for almost two hours.

The images led Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to announce a Royal Commission into the Northern Territory’s juvenile detention system. Grant says it’s not enough.

Indigenous teen Dylan Voller was strapped into a chair with a hood over his head at a Northern Territory juvenile detention centre. Picture: ABCSource:ABC

“In Australia today, a boy in a hood in a cell reminds us that indigenous people make up half of all youths in incarceration. We’re fewer than 3 per cent of the population and we are a quarter of those behind bars.

“This is happening in our country, in Australian towns, in 2016, and I can’t believe that this is who we are.”

“I can’t believe that a country as as wealthy, as prosperous, as cohesive, and as tolerant and welcoming as Australia is ... I can’t believe that this is what we are.”

His speech is timely given the release of an “alarming” Productivity Commission report on Thursday.

One of the key findings was that national imprisonment rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders increased over the past 15 years by 77 per cent. Elsewhere, self-harm within indigenous communities is up 56 per cent.

The commission notes that health, economic participation, education, justice and mental health “remain concerning”. Of seven Closing the Gap targets, Australia showed improvement in only three.

Grant says division is something he’s seeing elsewhere in the world, too.

“We’ve seen this with the election of Donald Trump,” he said on Wednesday night.

“These are times when we have to ask: do we see ourselves in each other or do we continue to see each other as something else?

“Barack Obama just today said we have to stop the us and them. We have to see ourselves in each other. And I think we have a better chance of doing that in Australia than any other place I’ve been.”

Stan Grant: One of GQ Magazine’s Men of the Year for 2016. Picture: GQ AustraliaSource:GQ Australia

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