The media will play a profound role in the Voice referendum, but are they up to it?

This week it became public that one of Australia’s most well-known journalists, Stan Grant, had decided to abandon his exemplary career. And I think it’s no coincidence that the timing of this decision and the resignation from his life’s work coincides with our nation’s defining moment. A moment where Australians as a collective will decide whether to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our constitution as the First Peoples through a committee with a constitutional guarantee that that committee will always exist, and that it will be known as the Voice.

Grant is perhaps one of our most high-profile Aboriginal people in this country and certainly our most high-profile Indigenous journalist. But he could not withstand the overwhelming racialised abuse and death threats he has received in recent times. He has been relentlessly pursued and hounded from public life.

On the question of his departure, he said: “I don’t think the media is up to this moment. It made me feel I didn’t want to be in the media any more. I am not putting myself above it. I am part of it. I am complicit with it, that it made me pause and made me think, I don’t want to be in an environment where conflict frames so much of what should be in public discourse. I am part of the problem and I want to be part of the solution.”

He went on: “I want to find a place of grace, far from the stench of the media. I want to go where I am not reminded of the social media sewer.”

I serve as the co-chair for Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition, and every day I am permeated by the media stench Grant describes. I wake up thinking about it at night. I wade through the social media sewer in the day in response to our positive messaging of hope for a better life for our people.

I know why Grant left. As the late Yunupingu described it: “It is like a splinter in our minds.”

In roughly seven weeks, Australians will decide whether to acknowledge Indigenous people in Australia’s founding documents. The media and those journalists who work in this sector play a profound role in the outcome. To pretend otherwise is to deny our own intelligence.

But what of the consolidation of media power, particularly on the question of Indigenous peoples’ rightful place in Australia? What is that particular lens?

Well, every few decades, as we stand on the cusp of progress for Indigenous peoples, we see it plainly. We see it being played out right now in relation to the referendum. And it will escalate dramatically over the next seven weeks. The consolidation of power in media ownership that works against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ interests is something I have experienced throughout my life. This is not new. It has also defined our colonial history.

In my work as a filmmaker, I’ve trolled through the media since it first began, really, with the Sydney Gazette. And it’s thematic in terms of its treatment of Indigenous peoples. That continues until today. And though it has changed over time, we see a constant. 

This demonisation of my people in the press and online is what we see again and again in the reasons put forward for why we do not deserve a voice. Meanwhile, the experts in child abuse — many of whom I know personally — and the experts in family violence and substance abuse are not sought out. Their solutions are not regarded. Their requests for meeting with politicians are ignored. The reports are shelved. Their voices are not heard.

And this is why we seek the Voice, to elevate the voices of experts in our communities. Those people with lived experience who have the solutions to our challenges. It is why we want the Australian people to make politicians finally listen to us.

Take, for example, the media coverage of crime in my hometown inbound to Mparntwe (Alice Springs). There is a real crime problem. But the media and politicians sensationalise and politicise it rather than work towards solutions. The Uluru Statement from the Heart highlights the extraordinary incarceration rates of our people, and especially our young people.

As the statement says, “we are not an innately criminal people”. Yet it seems that many in the media continue to believe that we are. That is certainly the assumption that underlies many of the stories I see about how to address crime in my town. It is easier to sensationalise the crime and put the shocking video of a street fight on high rotation than address the root cause of the problem.

There are many leaders and Aboriginal organisations who are working to address the underlying causes, while the media — driven by politicians — highlight the repressive, heavy-handed policing as the solution rather than the hard work of supporting and repairing communities and families.

I became a filmmaker through an opportunity provided to me in 1998 as part of the self-determination movement. My elders lobbied and worked hard for opportunities for a new generation of Aboriginal peoples to harness the tools of the media to ensure our self-representation in the media. Indigenous peoples now have a growing place in journalism. They can make a difference to how journalism reports on our people. And I want to pay credit to the ABC, which has done more than any other institution to produce a generation of leading Indigenous journalists.

And why? Why is it important for us to have a role? Because the sweep of history tells us that the media and journalism has not served our people, our cause, or the general understanding of the general public well on understanding who we are in the elements of journalism.

Responsibility of journalism is profound — to tell the truth. Truth is a great responsibility. Journalism and journalists have a special place in our democracy. As democratic citizens, we rely on journalists to provide the information we need to make informed decisions about elections and referendums like the one we face in the next few weeks — the referendum for the Voice.

When we look back at media coverage of the Voice, how true will the journalism be in focusing on the dissenting voices in the Indigenous community when we know that 80% of the Indigenous community want the Voice? 

Truth is central to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and the statement confronts some difficult truths. Just as First Peoples can’t change the constitution by ourselves, we cannot change the media alone either.

First Peoples have looked to journalists for help to support their protest actions — at the Day of Mourning in 1938, the Freedom Rides and referendum campaign in the 1960s, the Tent Embassy in the 1970s and the Bicentennial Marches in 1988. They have looked to journalists to educate Australians on the truth about the Australian wars and the truth about the continuing impact of dispossession on my people today.

We ask journalists to again seek the truth about the Uluru Statement and the modest proposal that has been put forward to the Australian people this year. When the Uluru Statement puts truth at the forefront, we’re talking about more than revealing the truth. We are talking about action on the truth.

And let’s face it, the truth is available. The work of historians and journalists over many years means that Australians can find out the truth about what happened in the Australian wars or what segregation meant in the 1960s and ’70s, or what life is like in the town camps and remote communities today.

Each year for more than 15 years now, we benchmark the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The point is, what will we do about this gap? Truth is important, but it must be followed by action. Identifying the problem is only a start. The next question is what do we do? And this is why we need a Voice. That’s why the Voice is our first priority. We must change the process to ensure governments and bureaucrats respond to the voices of ordinary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people who truly represent their communities from the grassroots up to the decision-makers in Canberra.

The Voice will be an authoritative representative body elected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It will be a committee, in a sense, an advisory committee, to make representations on behalf of First Nations peoples. No special legal powers to write or implement policy, but the moral power of representing the true Indigenous population of this country. Representation that is consistent.

The statement is a generous invitation to walk together into a better future, and the Voice is the first step.

This is an edited version of the annual AN Smith lecture in journalism delivered by Rachel Perkins this week at Melbourne University’s Centre for Advancing Journalism.