Stan Grant affair: progressives get a wake-up call, others hit the snooze button

Were you to write a satire of our current situation it might go something like this: a leading journalist and presenter, who made his career as a pioneer of tabloid TV that went after “dole bludgers”, single mothers etc, reinvents himself as an upmarket presence. Though he has never denied his First Nations’ heritage, as he makes the media market transition, it becomes a more prominent part of his public identity, and of his output. Increasingly the performance of his own pain at the country’s racist history becomes a focus for the national discussion of where we should go.

When, as a de facto leader of this process, he is attacked by his opponents on a reactionary, spite-slum TV station with 30,000 viewers, he quits a public network with millions of viewers, denouncing the entire organisation. At his last appearance, a show designed to hear from a range of viewpoints by Australian opinion makers and the public is reorganised so that he can make a final performance of his agon, at which he announces that it is not racism at all, but the media in general, and he himself, to blame, for which he gets a sustained standing ovation.

Have I missed anything?

Look, Stan Grant is clearly not a bad guy, but he’s been a TV presenter for decades, and inevitably he has a touch of narcissism, which is to on-air types what black lung is to coalminers. You’re just going to get it sooner or later, so you may as well plan for it.

Grant’s development of the second part of his career, as an author of books and a more thoughtful commentator on national issues than he once had scope to be, made him a prize catch: someone who could say something intelligent, with the slick skills of commercial TV transferred across. Various institutions have encouraged him in that, and they got what they wanted: a performance in which what the nation was going through was mapped by Stan onto his own life and emotions.

The man whose career began by introducing stories about dole cheats pretending to be seals to get free fish from oil rigs (or something) now began each episode of Q+A with a recitative in a First Nations language which quite possibly no-one listening actually spoke, just part of the absurd tokenism on such matters which has taken over the ABC in recent years.

When you set out to personify a major cause — which is one form of leadership — don’t be surprised if you become the principal target of that cause’s enemies. Grant participated in the ABC’s silly and irritating pre-coronation coverage debate, in which his contribution was once again performative and personalised. The event, which was a moment of real historical consequence for our nation, good or ill, demanded a neutral coverage — neither fawning nor sarcastic. It became another chance for the ABC to give a gee-up to the republican campaign, whose pathetic inability to generate its own politics shows that it is no sort of movement at all.

Grant’s announcement of his departure became an opportunity for a performative outburst by the wider media elite and knowledge class, about “our racism”, which largely means the racism of “the others”. Grant suggested he had been poorly supported by ABC management, not publicly defended against Sky as dark AF, and subject to relentless abuse in social media.

Only the first of these seems to be the responsibility of management. Maybe one statement from the ABC about the News Corp pile-on might have been wise. But it would also have been another manifestation of the Streisand effect. A TV station with 30,000 viewers would have had its obsessive campaign become a national news story. Social media? That’s just the return of the repressed (often the justifiably repressed). What people once said about you in pubs, they say about you online, and you get to hear about it.  

Grant’s personification and representation of “the cause”, and his crisis within it, comes at a time when the knowledge class’s increasingly obsessive self-definition through First Nations issues has become performative en masse. This has become a full kitschification, with, as Stuart Littlemore and David Salter noted in Nine’s newspapers, the national radio signal coming to you from Gadigal land etc etc.

This organisation is not immune. For 12 years here, I have been arguing that Crikey’s coverage of First Nations’ issues has been appallingly low in priority, that we need either a First Nations’ journalist or a series of reports from freelancers. Nothing has happened, and Bob Gosford’s “Northern Myth” blog was allowed to drift away. On the bright side, our Worm has events listing for “Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)”, which is rather silly and unctuous.

There’s also some hilarious hypocrisy going on. On Tuesday Patricia Karvelas on RN Breakfast grilled Defence Minister Richard Marles, fresh from a News Corp-sponsored conference on Australia’s defence (News Corp and weapons manufacturers), and pushed him to condemn News Corp’s attacks on Grant. “Disclosure,” Karvelas said. “I worked for The Australian for years.”

Disclosure: Karvelas didn’t disclose that when at The Australian she was the lead author of a string of articles attacking First Nations’ academic Larissa Behrendt for a funny, mildly bad-taste tweet she made to her 800 followers (while watching a Q+A episode featuring Bess Price). The Australian, with Karvelas in the lead, went Behrendt day after day on its front page, with a series of attacks that were far more implicitly racist — how dare a Black girl be an academic and thought leader was the unstated tenor of them — than anything Sky has thrown at Grant in the past week.

The attack on Behrendt was the first in a series of truly brutal attacks by The Australian, using the powers it once had as a paper that people read. The aim was to psychically terrorise the victim with the prospect of something new every day, relevant or otherwise. The campaigns were either indifferent to what they were doing, or actively seeking to prompt psychic collapse in the victim. They culminated in the truly malign attacks on Yassmin Abdel-Magied, driving her out of the country.

Karvelas’s campaign against Behrendt provided the template for that. It should have excluded her from a job at the ABC; instead she was allowed to reinvent herself as “PK”, which suggests that the accusations of structural racism within the ABC are true, and that it finds it far easier to accommodate “diversity” — southern Europeans, “people of colour” — than it does the tougher issues of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations and representation. Karvelas now uses her increasingly strident and programmatic breakfast show — which has lost 50% of its audience, 400,000 to 200,000, since she took it over from Fran Kelly’s more rounded effort — to interrogate people over their organisations’ racism. You couldn’t, as they say, make it up.

Political desperadoes will recognise a whiff of Leningrad 1937 about all of this. It is happening for the same reasons: because the campaign for the Voice Yes vote is visibly failing, and everything must be done to distribute blame anywhere but with the poor leadership and incompetence of the campaign.

The thing was inaugurated without the question of “executive consultation” being worked out, leading to public splits and nasty recriminations about motives. Noel Pearson, having hung back for some time, has now shown why he did, denouncing Mick Gooda as “a bedwetter” who has “achieved nothing” because Gooda suggested removing the executive consultation provision to make the referendum winnable. But it was topped a few days later by (checks notes) Pearson who in his column in The Australian denounced readers of (checks notes) The Australian for being obstructive N-voting nuisances who should just get out of the way — prompting editor Michelle Gunn to attach an endnote to Pearson’s column reassuring its readers that they were not, in fact, miserable crypto-racists. Incredible stuff.

While all this goes on, the 70% or so of non-Indigenous Australians outside the now utterly self-serving self-involved knowledge class watch in amazement. Some wish Black people well; most can see that there are wrongs to be righted; some are indifferent. But almost none caught in the daily struggle of raising families, making a living, dealing with rising costs, squeezing wages, housing shortages, a strained healthcare system, inadequate childcare, aged relatives without a real state system of care and much more, see this issue as absorbing or crucial to their life on this continent in the way that the elites within the knowledge class have made it to be.

Is that why support for the Yes campaign is falling steadily? Falling into a zone where a No result is a likely possibility? This is surely part of the reason, this relentless insistence by one dominant class against another whose lives it shapes, that it must feel a certain way, be shamed or guilty in a certain way, reshape its subjectivity and emotions to an authorised version of history and the present.

That never works. It returns through channels, and it is doing that now. As well as listening to the murmurings in our heart, it is worth paying attention to the singing in the wires, to hear what “the others” are saying outside the theatre of our obsessions, where it is increasingly difficult these days to pick the satire from the tragedy.

Has Rundle got it right? Is it all just a sad farce? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.