Aboriginal journalist Stan Grant resigns from the Australian channel

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BATHURST, Australia Prominent Indigenous journalist walks away from his role with Australia’s public broadcaster, citing despicable and relentless racism he and his family have faced, particularly after making critical remarks about the role of the British monarchy in colonialism during a panel discussion on Coronation of King Charles III.

Stan Grant is a well-known and well-respected television journalist who hosts the Australian Broadcasting Corp.s Q+A, a town hall-style show. In a column published Friday on the ABC site, he said he would finish this Monday show and then leave. For how long? I don’t know.

On social networks, my family and I are regularly victims of mockery or racist abuse, he wrote. It’s not new. Hardly a week goes by without me being racially discriminated against.

My wife is being abused because she is married to a Wiradjuri man, he added, naming the indigenous people of the central part of the state of New South Wales.

He also criticized the broadcaster for its lack of support.

I’m writing this because no one at the ABC whose producers invited me to their coronation coverage as a guest uttered a single word of public support, he wrote. No ABC executive has publicly refuted the lies written or spoken about me. I hold no individual responsible; it is an institutional failure.

Grant said the ABC filed a racial abuse complaint with Twitter targeting him.

His announcement comes at a pivotal year for Australia’s relationship with its indigenous people. The nation is preparing to vote in a constitutional referendum which, if successful, will establish a representative voice in Parliament for First Nations leaders. The body would consult national lawmakers on the policy, but its advice would be non-binding.

Australia to vote to give indigenous peoples a voice in parliament

In many ways, Indigenous Australians are more disadvantaged than other Australians. They have an average life expectancy about eight years shorter and are the most imprisoned population in the world. Indigenous children are 10 times more likely to be in state care.

Grant received a wave of abuse over his comments about the monarchy during a May 6 panel ahead of the coronation, despite other panelists also criticizing the monarchy and his continued role as leader of the Australian state.

Grant said he pointed out that the crown represents the invasion and theft of our land.

In recent years Australians have increasingly debated how they should view British colonialism. The country’s national day is January 26, which marks the landing of the first fleet of doomed British ships in 1788. But tens of thousands also use this date for national Invasion Day events highlighting that history indigenous to Australia dates back at least 65,000 years. , calling for the date to be changed out of sensitivity and to ameliorate the racism and disadvantage faced by Indigenous peoples.

In the name of the crown, my people have been separated into missions and reservations, Grant wrote. Police officers bearing crown seals have taken children from their families. Under the crown, our people were slaughtered.

The panel was called bile by radio talk show host Ray Hadley, who was quoted in the Australian, a family-owned Murdoch News Corp newspaper. Another radio talk show host, Neil Mitchell, reportedly said someone in the ABC must be responsible for airing all this bitterness about our Indigenous history in the run-up to the coronation. The article was one of several conservative outlets targeting Grants’ panel and comments.

Kingdoms contemplating separation from monarchy mostly ignore coronation

News Corp. did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. A spokesperson for Nine Entertainment, which employs Hadley and Mitchell, said it had no comment and would not make any assumptions about Grants’ comments.

Journalist Osman Faruqi, who also worked at the ABC, supported Grants’ comments and criticized broadcasters’ work culture for non-white staff.

Before I started my first role with the ABC in 2018, almost every non-white person who had worked in the organization advised me against taking a job there, he wrote in an opinion piece. for the newspaper Age. They cited story after story of overt racism from colleagues, managers and the public.

When I started and ran into many of the same problems I had been warned about, there were a handful of older, experienced colleagues from non-white backgrounds who did their best to help us, a he added. One of them was Stan Grant.

Sami Shah, another Australian journalist who worked for the ABC, wrote on Twitter that half of the ABC executives reading this will call him ungrateful and an Australian term for whiny and hard to work with. The other half will commit to doing better, oversee an internal review, and then move on after compiling a PowerPoint presentation.

In response to a request for comment, the ABC said it had a zero-tolerance approach to racism in the workplace and that any issues raised were being investigated.

In a statement after Grants’ announcement, ABC News Director Justin Stevens said the ABC supported Grant and condemned the attacks directed at him after the coronation panel.

Responsibility for coverage rests with ABC News management, not Stan Grant, he said. Yet it was he who paid the price for a tirade of criticism.

Grant has decades of experience, including more than a decade with CNN, where he covered China as a senior correspondent. He is also the author of several books, including Talking To My Country, a memoir and discussion of Australia’s relationship to race. His latest is titled The Queen is Dead: The Time Has Come For a Reckoning.

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