Stan Grant takes aim at ‘devastatingly convincing’ Jacinta Price for Voice defeat

High-profile former ABC journalist and Voice advocate Stan Grant has broken his silence following the defeat of the referendum, saying Australia’s views on reconciliation were set in stone by the No vote and he doubted he would live to see a changed nation.

Grant, a Wiradjuri man who left the national broadcaster this year after his hosting gig on Q+A made him the target of racial abuse, used the JG Crawford Oration speech at the Australian National University to take aim at No campaigner Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s campaign and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s characterisation of the Voice as “a modest request”.

Former ABC journalist Stan Grant has broken his silence over the Voice referendum defeat.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

“Our nation is set in stone. One word: no. Whatever hope there may be for a different Australia, I likely won’t live to see it,” Grant said in the speech, titled The Witness of Poetry, in which he described the Voice as a “thing of poetry” rather than of politics.

He also said the No vote had crushed his own hope that the voice of his ancestors would speak through him. “My country has buried my ancestors for a second time,” he said.

Grant described Price, though not by name, as “devastatingly convincing”.

He described her as the “victorious politician who says this No vote puts an end to the politics of grievance” and who waves away generational trauma as “mere contrivance”.

Shadow minister for Indigenous Australians Jacinta Nampijinpa Price in the Senate after the referendum defeat. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“But the politician is so devastatingly convincing. The politician has no tolerance for history, pain is negated by progress,” he said.

He also targeted Albanese’s continued messaging that the Voice was a modest request from Indigenous Australians.

“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,” he said.

Grant is the latest Voice advocate to reflect on the significant defeat of the referendum on October 14 after most advocates took a week-long vow of silence.

Last week, Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo spoke of the “emptiness in my chest” after the crushing defeat, but vowed to keep fighting for recognition which is “unfinished business” for Australia.

Grant said the complexities of the lives of Indigenous Australians had been subjected to polling, and “reduced to a slogan or a choice: Yes or No”.

“And 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,” he said of the morning after the referendum defeat.

The veteran former broadcaster and author also referenced No Poetry after Auschwitz by philosopher Theodor Adorno, criticising a breakdown in meaningful language during significant debate. “The word itself – evil – is banal. Did the Nazis too not read Shakespeare and Goethe?” he said.

“It is hard to think of Australia as a place of evil, there is just so much sunshine, smiling faces and wide open spaces. But evil has happened here. What else should we call it? People beheaded, flour poisoned, frontier raiding parties.”

Grant said he was tired of lies and spin: “Liberal spin, I am tired of Labor spin, I am tired of Yes spin and No spin.”

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