Culture

Stan Grant And Indigenous Body Give No-Bullshit Response To The PM’s Tears Over Indigenous Struggle

"Words and empathy must be measured by action."

by Meg Watson  1 March 2016

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A little over a month since his speech on Australian racism went viral, journalist Stan Grant last night premiered his new show, The Point, on NITV. Concerned with a “distinctive Indigenous approach to storytelling”, the current affairs show will consist of reports, interviews and analysis “from the heart of our communities to the corridors of power”. And boy, did he start things off right.

Scoring the first interview Malcolm Turnbull has ever given from the Lodge, Grant sat down with the Prime Minister for a one-on-one chat about many of the major issues facing Indigenous Australians today. They talked about constitutional recognition; Turnbull supports it and thinks a referendum on the matter is “feasible” for next year. They discussed the nation’s horrific Indigenous incarceration rates; Turnbull deplores them and attests to working with the Indigenous Affairs minister to “break the cycle”. But perhaps the most memorable moment came when the pair spoke of the decline of Australia’s first languages.

Here, he recalled an elderly Indigenous woman telling him about a lullaby her mother would sing in the near-extinct Ngunnawal language — the same language he used in his Closing The Gap address last month. “She was a very old lady and she remembers her mother singing this [song] to her. And the thing that’s so sad is to imagine that mother singing that story to her at a time when you were losing culture and the last thing that baby was was safe,” he said. And then, he cried.

Though this has generated plenty of headlines overnight, many of which are centred upon his big show of compassion, the most important may be a direct response from Grant himself. Echoing similar statements given at the end of his show, the host noted how welcome and important Turnbull’s sympathies are, but also how much it needs to be backed by real change.

“Never before had an Indigenous language been spoken in our Federal Parliament, now the Prime Minister was giving voice to tens of thousands of years of tradition,” Grant wrote, speaking of the PM’s past address. “These things matter to Malcolm Turnbull: language matters; story matters … He speaks a lot about hope. He wants to celebrate success and promote innovation and entrepreneurship. But the reality of black lives often mocks optimism.”

Though Grant commended the PM on his pledge to “speak with — not to — Indigenous communities”, he certainly didn’t give him an A+ report card.

“Like his predecessor Tony Abbott he wants to be known as the Prime Minister for Indigenous people, just as, he says, he is Prime Minister for all Australians. But he won’t commit to continuing Mr Abbott’s tradition of spending a week each year in an Indigenous community.”

“The Prime Minister has spoken Indigenous language, he has shed a tear over our past, now words and empathy must be measured by action.”

In case you’re new to much of this, there’s plenty of action that needs to be taken. Though Turnbull was commended for his sympathetic words and use of Indigenous language in last month’s address, the Closing the Gap report he spoke to revealed little to no movement on hugely important problems Australia’s first people continue to face. The Indigenous child mortality rate is falling and more students are staying through to Year 12, but the targets for increasing the employment rate and life expectancy are still nowhere near being met. Aboriginal employment has actually fallen since the initiative was first created, and Indigenous people are estimated to live a whopping 10 years less than other Australians.

To his credit, Turnbull used this same address to pledge $20 million to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies; an effort to conserve Indigenous languages and culture which federal governments have previously shirked or actively suppressed. That is not nothing. But it also made no mention of concrete measures to address Indigenous incarceration for instance; a fact Bill Shorten jumped on at the time, and Turnbull continued to offer little solution for last night.

The response to Turnbull’s comments has been mixed; perhaps best characterised by co-chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples Rod Little as cautiously optimistic. “There was a tinge of hope,” he told the ABC. “[But] I’m frustrated because I see the same kinds of comments … time and time again, and the results of that rhetoric is the results that we have today — no closing of the gap, no, high incarceration rates, high suicide levels — all of those things.”

This is similar to what journalist (and former Canberra speechwriter) Martin McKenzie-Murray noted in The Saturday Paper after Turnbull’s original address last month. “Prime Minister Rudd made his first Closing the Gap speech in February 2009,” he wrote. “Three subsequent prime ministers have now made the annual update speech – conventionally in the first week of parliament. The agenda being new in 2009, Rudd could largely offer aspirational language. Little had changed. But he would say something that has echoed since. ‘To speak fine words and then forget them would be worse than doing nothing at all’.”

Sounds like something to keep in mind when watching Turnbull’s next moves.

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The Point is now on weeknights at 9pm on NITV.