Stan Grant: 'But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history', Ethics Centre IQ2 debate - 2015

27 October 2015, City Recital Hall, Sydney, Australia

This speech was delivered in an IQ2 debate with the topic, 'Racism is destroying the Australian dream'. Also for the affirmative was Pallavi Sinha. For the negative was Jack Thompson and Rita Panahi. The full debate is here. 

Thank you. Thank you so much for coming along this evening, and I'd also like to extend my respects to my Gadigal brothers and sisters from my people, the Wiradjuri people.

In the winter of 2015, Australia turned to face itself. it looked into its soul and it had to ask this question. Who are we? What sort of a country do we want to be.

And this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. It happened on the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstand.

Thousands of voices rose to hound an indigenous man, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian of the Year.

And they hounded that man into submission.

I can’t speak for the what lay in the hearts of the people who booed Adam Goodes. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos.

We heard a sound that is very familiar to us.

We heard a howl.

We heard a howl that of humiliation has echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival.

We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.

The Australian dream.

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 ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free.

We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons, and if you are a juvenile it is worse, it’s fifty percent. An indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.

I love a sunburned country

A land of sweeping plains

Of rugged mountain ranges

It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains, we were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains. I come from those plains. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820s the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time, go to the Sydney Gazette, and look it up, and read about it. Martial law was declared, and my people could be shot on sight.

Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths.

The Australian dream.

The Australian dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream. It is there at the birth of the nation . It is there in terra nullius.  An empty land. A land for the taking.

Sixty thousand years of occupation.

A people who made the first seafaring journey in the history of mankind.

A people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics, none of it mattered.

Because our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law. And when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman, and if we were human at all, we occupied the lowest rung on civilisation’s ladder.

We were fly blown, stone age savages and that was the language that was used.

Charles Dickens, the great writer of the age, when referring to the noble savage of which we were counted among, said ‘it would be better that they be wiped off the face of the earth’. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment, a man who was instructed to make peace with the so called natives in a matter of years, was sending out raiding parties with instruction ‘bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers’.

They were smoothing the dying pillow.  

My people were rounded up and put on missions, from where, if you escaped. You were hunted down, you were roped and tied and dragged back, and it happened here, it happened on the mission that my grandmother and great grandmother were from, the Warrengesda on the Darling Point of the Murrumbidgee River.

Read about it. It happened.

By 1901 when we became a nation, when we federated the colonies, we were nowhere. We’re not in the Constitution, save for ‘Race Provisions’ -- which allowed for laws to be made that would take our children, that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and tell us where we could live.

The Australian dream.

By 1963, the year of my birth, the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon an aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes, and they burned those homes to the ground, and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. And today those people remember that as ‘The Night of the Burning’.

In 1963 when I was born, I was counted amongst the flora and fauna, not among the citizens of this country.

Now you will hear things tonight, you will hear people say, ‘but you’ve done well!’

Yes I have, and I’m proud of it, and why have I done well?

I’ve done well because of who came before me.

I’ve done well because of my father, who lost the tips off three fingers working in saw mills to put food on our table, because he was denied an education.

My grandfather, who served to fight wars for this country when he was not yet a citizen and came back to a segregated land where he couldn’t even share a drink with his digger mates in the pub because he was black.

My great grandfather who was jailed for speaking his language to his grandson - my father - jailed for it!

My grandfather on my mother’s side who married a white woman who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town, until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy, and ran over over the graves of the three children he’d buried there.

That’s the Australian dream. I have succeeded in spite of the Australian dream, not because of it; and I have succeeded because of those people.

You might hear tonight, ‘but you have white blood in you.’ And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would  tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person.

The Australian dream. We’re better than this.

I’ve have seen the worst of the world as a reporter. I’ve spent a decade in war zones, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We are an extraordinary country, we are in so many respects the envy of the world. If I were sitting here, where my friends are tonight (gestures to opponents] I would be arguing passionately for this country.

But I stand here with my ancestors, and the view looks very different from where I stand.

The Australian dream.

We have our heroes.

Albert Namatjira painted the soul of this nation.

Vincent Lingiari put his hand out for Gough Whitlam to pour the sand of his country through his fingers, and say ‘this is my country’.

Cathy Freeman lit the torch for the Olympic Games.

But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history.

Of course racism is killing the Australian dream! It is self evident that it is killing the Australian dream.

But we are better than that.

The people who stood up and supported Adam Goodes and said, ‘no more’, they are better than that.

The people who marched across the bridge for reconciliation, they are better than that.

The people who supported Kevin Rudd when he said sorry to the Stolen Generations, they are better than that.

My children and their non indigenous friends are better than that.

My wife who is non indigenous is better than that.

And one day I want to stand here, and be able to say as proudly and sing as loudly as anyone in this room, Australians all let us rejoice.

Thanks you.

Stan Grant was a wonderful guest on episode 8 of the podcast, talking about this speech.

Christopher Hitchens: 'A celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea', Munk Debate - 2010

This is an edited version of the Munk Debate versus Tony Blair - 'Is religion a force for good in the world'. The full debate is on Speakola here.

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that: created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent—exigent, I would say more than exigent—greedy for uncritical praise from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place. However, let no one say there's no cure: salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said—it must be said, would have to admit, makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims. Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I'm asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but of their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, "Beautiful, almost perfect, now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord"?

... Well now, in fairness, no one was arguing that religion should or will die out of the world, and all I'm arguing is that it would be better if there was a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism. And I knew it would come up that we'd be told about charity, and I take this very seriously, because we know, ladies and gentlemen, as it happens, we're the first generation of people who do really, what the cure for poverty really is. It eluded people for a long, long time. The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women ... try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of—now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say. But it won't bring—I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It won't bring back the millions of people who have died wretched deaths because of their teaching. That still goes on. I'd like to hear a word of apology from the religious about that, if it was on offer ..

... Do we grant to Hamas and to Hezbollah, both of whom will tell you, and incessantly do, "Look at our charitable work. Without us defending the poor of Gaza, the poor of Lebanon, where would they be? And they're right, they do a great deal of charitable work. It's nothing compared to the harm that they do, but it's a great deal of work all the same ...

...We don't require divine permission to know right from wrong. We don't need tablets administered to us ten at a time in tablet form on pain of death to be able to have a moral argument. No, we have the reasoning and the moral suasion of Socrates and of our own abilities. We don't need dictatorship to give us right from wrong, and that's my lot, thank you.

...I'm intrigued now, so religion could be a good thing after all, sometimes, we think, is now the proposition. What would a religion have to do to get that far? Well, I think it would have to give up all supernatural claims. It would have to say no, you are not to do this under the threat of reward, heaven, or the terror of punishment, hell. No, we can't offer you miracles. Find me the church that will say, "Forget all that. Faith healing, no." It would have to give that up. It would have to give up the idea of an eternal, unalterable authority figure who is judge, jury, and executioner, against whom there could be no appeal and who wasn't finished with you even when you died. That's quite a lot for religion to give up, don't you think? But who would not say we would be better off without it if it was, or what Tony Blair would like it to be like it to be, an aspect of humanism, an aspect of compassion, an aspect of the realizations of human solidarity, the knowledge we are all in fact bound up with one another, that we have responsibilities one to another, and as I do when I give blood, partly because I don't lose the pint forever, I can always get it back, but that there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you.

Jane Caro: 'Why hasn't the Dalai Lama been reincarnated as a girl?', IQ2 Debate - 2011

10 November, 2011,

Jane was debating in the negative team for the topic 'That Atheists are Wrong' for the Intelligence Squared series on ABC.

Atheists, like the religious, are wrong about many things, but they are not wrong about God. And the prima facie evidence that all current Gods are man made is of course, their treatment of women.

The idea that women are fully human is something that man-made religions seem to struggle with. I love the paradise that is offered to Islamic jihad warriors. Apparently, as martyrs for Allah they will receive their reward in heaven by disporting themselves with innumerable virgins. As one wit put it, imagine all those obedient, god-fearing Muslim women who keep themselves pure behind all encompassing clothing out of their devout worship of their God, only to find, that when they die, their reward for all that virginal vigilance is to end up as a whore for terrorists. My own response when I heard about this extraordinarily male-centric view of the eternal reward was to wonder what appalling sin those poor virgins must have committed to require such punishment. In other words, the terrorist’s heaven was clearly the virgin’s hell.

This fantasy of heaven, by the way, illustrates religion’s use of a classic advertising trick – they create fear of damnation in the powerless; women, slaves and the poor – then offer them hope of salvation – but only after they are dead. Religion has been used this way to keep all sorts of people in their place, but in my 9 minutes, I will concentrate on their effect on women.

Conveniently for the blokes who invented them, Gods of all kinds are entirely happy to see one half of humanity held in subjection to the other half. According to many of their earthly messengers, they have approved of and even commanded that women be beaten, raped – at least in marriage, and sold as property, either to husbands or masters. Gods have stated that a woman’s testimony and word is worth less than a mans, that she is not to be permitted to speak in public, take part in public life, take “headship” over a man, preach religion, or, in extreme cases, even appear in public. It was religious belief that drove what may be the longest and bloodiest pogrom in recorded human history; the persecution and execution of (in the vast majority of cases) vulnerable women accused of witchcraft across Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries.

In some parts of the world, in theocracies, we still watch Gods deny women and girls the right to work, travel, drive, get access to healthcare, or even walk the streets unaccompanied. In 2002, 14 schoolgirls died in a fire in Mecca, after being forced back into a burning building by religious police, because they were not properly covered.

Women’s lives only began to improve in the West when feminism emerged thanks to the secular Enlightenment. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of “Vindication of the Rights of Women”, could not provide a greater contrast to that first Mary, the so-called mother of God. No virgin, she was a vulnerable and suffering human being. Blessed (if you will excuse the term) with a shining intellect and the clear-eyed courage it took to see through millennia of male hypocrisy, she was despised and vilified in her own time – most often by the religious.

But her words took hold, and in the 300 years since she first put pen to paper, the lives of women and girls, at least in the developed world, have changed unarguably for the better. By almost any objective measure, women in the secular west are better off than they ever have been before. In terms of longevity, mental, physical, reproductive and emotional health, economic independence and human rights, today’s woman leaves her female ancestors for dead. Unfortunately, however, at almost every step representatives of God have resisted women’s progress.

The religious have variously opposed higher education for women, higher status employment for women, their right to vote, their right to enter parliament, their right to their own earnings, income and property, their right to their own children after divorce or separation, their right to resist domestic violence, their right to learn about their own bodies, their right to refuse sexual intercourse in marriage, or agree to it outside marriage, and their right to contraception, abortion and sexual information. Less than a century or so ago, if a woman was so badly damaged by successive child-bearing that doctors advised against further pregnancy, churches resisted her right to use (or even know about) contraception and she had to rely on the good will and restraint of her husband to avoid further catastrophic damage or even death. Only last year a nun was excommunicated for allowing the US hospital she ran to give an abortion to a woman who would have died without it.

When chloroform was invented in the 19th century, doctors immediately heralded it as a boon for birthing women. Church leaders condemned it because they believed women’s suffering in labour was ordained by God as punishment for Eve’s original sin. Fortunately for labouring women the then head of the Church of England was herself a birthing mother. Queen Victoria ignored her spiritual advisors as she gave birth to her nine children and grabbed chloroform with both hands, immediately making pain relief in childbirth acceptable.

To be fair, as women have made gains in the secular and developed world, many religious believers and leaders have changed their opinions and been persuaded about the universal benefit of female equality and opportunity. Many religious feminists argue passionately that there is nothing necessarily godly about the oppression of women, but –if as the Bible says – by their fruits shall ye judge them, even today they are on shaky ground.

It is no co-incidence that societies where women enjoy high levels of personal freedom are the richest and most stable in the world. We now understand that when you educate women and girls the benefits accrue to the entire family, rather than simply to the individual. There is even research to indicate that in societies with more women in positions of power and influence men have longer life expectancy. Can it also be a co-incidence that these societies are also among the most secular and, apart from the US, are often cited as those where belief in a God is dying most rapidly? Looked at from that perspective, it is almost as if God and women’s rights are diametrically opposed to one another. As one rises, the other falls. The fact that Gods and women appear to be so firmly in opposite corners is yet another indication to me that God’s are all about men.

It is impossible in 9 minutes to do justice to the fearful price women have paid as a result of man-made religion. I have not time to mention the fearful decimation of women by HIV in Africa, helped along by the wicked and paranoid misinformation about the permeability of condoms promoted by the Catholic Church. Suffice to say, four out of ten girls in Kenya are now HIV positive – many god-fearing virgins infected on their wedding night. For me, however, it is not just the gross history of religion’s treatment of women that informs my atheism. It is the simple fact of the one-eyed nature of all the world’s religions that finally convinces me that all Gods are man-made. Yes, even Buddhism, that last refuge of the fashionable western mystic. After all, why hasn’t the Dalai Lama ever been re-incarnated as a girl?