Stan Grant address at the IQ debate a ‘Martin King Luther’ moment
Pallavi Sinha with Stan Grant at the IQ2 debate series held last year organised by the Ethics Centre
As part of the IQ2 debate series held by the Ethics Centre, Grant joined immigration lawyer Pallavi Sinha, Herald Sun columnist Rita Panahi and Australian actor Jack Thompson to argue for or against the topic “Racism is destroying the Australian dream”. The debate won hands down by both Stan and Pallavi by 64 percent in affirmative as it created a charged atmosphere when even the veteran actor Jack Thompson though debating against said, “Racism is inherent in us. We are already the victims of racist attitudes. When we arrived and the dream we spoke of in fact is in itself a racist dream.”
The event was held last year, but the Ethics Centre only released the video online on Friday.
This video, having gone viral, has been viewed by now over 3 million times and shared by over 30,000 on the social net work.
The media commentator and writer, Mike Carlton, described Grant’s address as Australia’s “Martin Luther King moment,” and “Stan Grant” was still trending on Twitter on Sunday morning.
“The Australian dream,” Grant said. “We sing of it and we recite it in verse; ”˜Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free’.
“My people die young in this country. We die 10 years younger than the average Australian, and we are far from free. We are fewer than 3% of the Australian population and yet we are 25% ”“ one quarter ”“ of those Australians locked up in our prisons. And if you’re a juvenile it is worse, it is 50%. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.”
He spoke of his Indigenous ancestors, including his grandmother and great-grandmother, who were among those institutionalised in missions, where Indigenous people were forced into unpaid labour and abused. He referenced the “war of extermination” against his ancestors.
“I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges,” Grant said, referencing the famous poem, My Country, by the Australian writer Dorothea Mackellar.
“It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, diseases ravaged us on those plains.
“Our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law, and when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman. We were fly-blown, Stone-Age savages, and that was the language that was used. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment … was sending out raiding parties with the instruction; ”˜bring back the severed heads of the black trouble-makers’.
“By 1901 when we became a nation, we were nowhere, we were not in the constitution. Save for race provisions which allowed for laws to be made which would take our children that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and where we could live. The Australian dream.”
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