Chief Asia Correspondent, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Ceremony: 9 October 2018, 10:30am - Faculty of Arts of Social Sciences
Thank you very much – thank you for that introduction. I’d like to begin by paying my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and congratulate all of you on your achievement today. It’s a real treat for me to be here. I spend far too much time in the media pulling the wings off butterflies and having to referee conflict. To be amongst people who are achieving things to see this remarkable event today is a real pleasure for me. You are an indication of just how far our world has come.
We live in a remarkable time. We live in a time where we have lifted more people out of poverty than at any other age in human history. A time of the free movement of people around the world, and you’re all an example of that. A time where borders have come down, and the longest single continuous period of global peace that the world has ever known, despite the range of conflicts that still trouble our globe.
Thirty years ago, a then-little-known political scientist in the United States, Francis Fukuyama, penned an essay that he called The End of History. The end of history. It was that heady time when the Berlin Wall was about to come down and we were seeing the end of the Iron Curtain. The great ideological struggle of the 20th century fought between communism and totalitarianism and liberal western democracy was coming to an end. To Fukuyama, this was the ultimate triumph of the idea of liberalism – the idea of the individual; the idea of universal human rights; the idea that government could be of the people, by the people and for the people.
That was an extraordinary period in our history that saw an outpouring of freedom around the world. In 1970, there were just over 30 countries in the world that classed themselves as democracies. By the early 2000s, that had risen to 110; more than half the nations on earth called themselves democracies. Little wonder, that Fukayama surveyed the globe and saw this as the end of history. Not the end of events, but that the great ideological, philosophical battles had been fought and won. How wrong he was.
What have we seen in the past 30, 25 years? What are we seeing around our world right now? Rather than an age of universalism, what we’re seeing is a return of nationalism, of tribalism, of sectarianism. An age where politics is driven by anger and fear. Indeed, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra has dubbed this the age of anger. Who are the most successful leaders in our world today? They are more likely to be the authoritarian, populist demagogues. Think of them: Erdoğan in Turkey, Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Duterte in the Philippines, Orbán in Hungary – Viktor Orbán, who now talks about democracy not in terms of liberalism but illiberalism. And to some extent, Donald Trump in the United States.
All of these leaders have something in common: they speak to a sense of fear and anxiety, to a sense of loss, to something the American political writer Mark Lilla has called a militant nostalgia. A militant nostalgia that things were better ‘back then’. If only we could recover some golden age, we could restore our countries to glory. We could make America great again. Think about Vladimir Putin, who speaks of the greatest tragedy of the 20th century as being the collapse of the Soviet Union. Think of Xi Jinping in China who now speaks constantly of the 100 years of humiliation, the 100 years of domination of China by foreign powers extending back to the Opium Wars. This is not just a resurgence or a rise of China; it is seen by many as a revenge of China. These are people who draw on historical grievance. These are people who fashion identity around historical grievance. Identity based on us and them. Not the universalism imagined by Fukuyama of a world brought closer together, but a world divided. [Name], the Indian philosopher and economist, has called this solitarist identity. Solitarist identity. He says this is identity that kills.
As a reporter for more than three decades travelling the world, reporting the world’s great conflicts, I’ve seen this firsthand. Think of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, think of the blood feud of Shia and Sunni Islam. Think of Hindu and Muslim; the existential nuclear stand-off between Pakistan and India. North and South Korea. Identity sits at the core of so many of the conflicts of our world, and identity is driving the politics of our age.
It was identity that led Hilary Clinton to speak of the white working class in America who voted for Donald Trump as deplorable. It was identity that brought these people together to put Donald Trump into the White House. When he said America first, he spoke to them. It was identity that lay at the heart of the Brexit vote, where people in Britain decided that they would exit the European Union – that the great cosmopolitan universal idea of our age could not stand. It is identity that has seen a resurgence of the right across Europe. It is identity that has led to the Alternative for Germany as now the second-most successful and powerful party in the German Parliament. It is identity that has seen Marine Le Pen and her National Party achieve their highest vote ever in France. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, now in the parliament with the highest representation that his party has ever had.
This is a blowback. It is an anger at globalisation. It is a challenge to democracy. Democracy now is in retreat. Democracy does not die, necessarily, from outside, but it also dies from within where we see a weakening of the soft guardrails of democracy – a loss of faith in institutions, a loss of faith in our courts, a loss of faith in our governments. In Australia, we have not been immune. We’ve seen a resurgence of politics here on the fringes as well. We live in a volatile political age. More than a third of people at the last election cast a ballot for someone other than the two major political parties. The Senate is controlled by the crossbenchers. We are throwing out governments with regularity, both at a state and federal level. We are turning over political leaders at a rate unseen. We are constantly in opinion-poll mode. Politics is captured by the fringe. There’s been a hollowing out of leadership and a lack of appetite for reform. The Lowy Institute polled last year faith in democracy and found that for more than a third of Australians under the age of 25, they no longer believe that democracy is the best form of government.
China’s rise is a singular challenge to this age. China has been a remarkable story. I spent a decade reporting it, seeing a country that in my lifetime was once dismissed as the sick man of Asia, a country that could not feed itself, a country wracked by revolution that’s now on track to become the most powerful economy in the world. But I’ve also seen a country where I was locked up, detained, beaten up for trying to report the truth of that country where brave Chinese people stood up and were locked up for trying to speak the truth of that country. Where [name], Nobel Prize winner, died in a prison because he stood up to tell the truth. There is now a real challenge to liberal democracy, and it comes from an authoritarian capitalism.
China is rewriting history. The idea that economic growth would lead inexorably to liberalism and democracy is being turned on its head. China is a challenge to this age. The question now is, can our international bodies, can our multilateral framework, hold? Can it incorporate China as it should, as a powerful and important nation in this world? Or will we inevitably see a clash? Many people are now talking about what they call the Thucydides trap. The Thucydides trap dates back to the Peloponnesian Wars and it says this: that a rising power will meet a waning power and it will lead inevitably to conflict. Fifteen times, we’ve seen this happen across the course of human history and more than a dozen times we’ve seen it lead to conflict.
1914, the rise of Germany and the waning power of Great Britain tipped the world into a bloody conflict they called the war to end all wars, and then a generation later they did it again. There is real concern that perhaps we are sleepwalking to another war. These are hard times. These are perilous times, and these are the times we need people like you to step forward and to show us a different way – that you bring what you’ve learned here to shine the light into the world.
More than 150 years ago, a French philosopher and historian, Ernest Renan, posed this question: what is a nation? What is a nation? What binds us together? What, for all of our differences, keeps us together in peace? A nation, he said, is not defined by race. A nation is not defined by language. A nation is not defined by religion. A nation is not bordered by its mountains and its rivers. A nation, he said, is a collective will. A nation, he said, is a daily referendum where we ask ourselves: who are we going to be? What does the daily referendum of our time tell ourselves? Are we a nation riven by identity, divided by our politics, torn apart? Are we a globe retreating from democracy? Is this what it means to say we belong to a nation today?
Ernest Renan looked at the question of history – history that can sit at the heart of toxic identities that we are seeing driving so much of the conflict in our world, and he said history can tear a nation apart. A nation, he said, is built on as much on what we are prepared to forget as what we remember. As much on what we are prepared to forget as what we remember. We always choose – we choose the things that define us. We choose the things to commemorate. Why do we elevate ANZAC Day over Kokoda? We choose these things that tell us who we are. We choose the monuments, we choose the statues, we choose the national days, we choose the flags and the anthems that tell us who we believe we are.
It’s a challenge to our age. Do we build nations on unending historical grievance? Do we tear ourselves limb from limb on identity based around a sense of us and them, or do we reach for something greater, and what are we prepared to forget? Not forget as in amnesia – not a wiping out of history, but a choice that we will elevate our sense of civic identity above a history that divides us. What questions does that ask of us in Australia today? Australia, where we still live with the scars of our history, that my people – Indigenous people – still bear the scars of that history. We’re the first peoples of Australia, despite the undoubted success that I’ve had and so many others, statistically, still die 10 years younger than the rest of the population, still chronically over-represented in our prisons and still have the worst health, housing, education and employment outcomes of any other people in Australia. The first people of Australia, who still live with the weight of that history. What are we prepared to forget to build a nation?
For us, it is overcoming what Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet, once called the memory of wounds. He said perhaps all memory is the memory of wounds. For Australia, it is opening its eyes to a country that is older than 200 plus years, that dates back tens of thousands of years, that incorporates that story into the heart of this nation’s story, that finds a place for the first peoples of Australia at the heart of this democracy. In the introduction, it was pointed out to you that I was part of the Referendum Council where we travelled Australia trying to find a pathway towards answering this question: what is a nation? What is the Australian nation?
Indigenous people spoke with a powerful voice at Uluru – the Uluru Statement. And it called for several things: it called for a reckoning of our history, for a truth and justice process, a cathartic process, not a process of shame and blame but a process of opening ourselves up to a truth. Remembering to forget. It asked for a coming together, a [word], a Yongu word that speaks of peace after a battle. And it asked for an Indigenous voice to be inserted into the Constitution of Australia so that Indigenous people may have a voice, they have input into policy directed toward them.
That’s what it asked for, but it was asking for much more than that. It was asking to complete the story of a nation – that a people excluded from this democracy, that a people who had walked the farthest distance and carried the heaviest load would walk that extra mile for the other people in Australia, would see a future for Indigenous people in Australia in the heart of the very constitution that, when it was written, excluded them. It hasn’t come to fruition, but hope has not dimmed that one day it will find its place in Australia. That we will find a way to speak of ourselves as a nation with a deep tradition at its heart that incorporates the British settlement and everyone else who has come here since.
At a time when democracy is in retreat around the world, at a time when we are riven by tribalism, at a time when we are closer together yet as divided as we have been, here were a people offering a gift to Australia. This was Ernest Renan’s idea of finding a collective will. This was asking us what we believe in. This was our daily referendum. This was asking us who are we as a nation? These are the questions I want to leave with you today as you take your place in the world and take everything that you’ve learned here to make not us a better country but the world a better place. Thank you so much.
Speech
Thank you very much – thank you for that introduction. I’d like to begin by paying my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and congratulate all of you on your achievement today. It’s a real treat for me to be here. I spend far too much time in the media pulling the wings off butterflies and having to referee conflict. To be amongst people who are achieving things to see this remarkable event today is a real pleasure for me. You are an indication of just how far our world has come.
We live in a remarkable time. We live in a time where we have lifted more people out of poverty than at any other age in human history. A time of the free movement of people around the world, and you’re all an example of that. A time where borders have come down, and the longest single continuous period of global peace that the world has ever known, despite the range of conflicts that still trouble our globe.
Thirty years ago, a then-little-known political scientist in the United States, Francis Fukuyama, penned an essay that he called The End of History. The end of history. It was that heady time when the Berlin Wall was about to come down and we were seeing the end of the Iron Curtain. The great ideological struggle of the 20th century fought between communism and totalitarianism and liberal western democracy was coming to an end. To Fukuyama, this was the ultimate triumph of the idea of liberalism – the idea of the individual; the idea of universal human rights; the idea that government could be of the people, by the people and for the people.
That was an extraordinary period in our history that saw an outpouring of freedom around the world. In 1970, there were just over 30 countries in the world that classed themselves as democracies. By the early 2000s, that had risen to 110; more than half the nations on earth called themselves democracies. Little wonder, that Fukayama surveyed the globe and saw this as the end of history. Not the end of events, but that the great ideological, philosophical battles had been fought and won. How wrong he was.
What have we seen in the past 30, 25 years? What are we seeing around our world right now? Rather than an age of universalism, what we’re seeing is a return of nationalism, of tribalism, of sectarianism. An age where politics is driven by anger and fear. Indeed, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra has dubbed this the age of anger. Who are the most successful leaders in our world today? They are more likely to be the authoritarian, populist demagogues. Think of them: Erdoğan in Turkey, Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Duterte in the Philippines, Orbán in Hungary – Viktor Orbán, who now talks about democracy not in terms of liberalism but illiberalism. And to some extent, Donald Trump in the United States.
All of these leaders have something in common: they speak to a sense of fear and anxiety, to a sense of loss, to something the American political writer Mark Lilla has called a militant nostalgia. A militant nostalgia that things were better ‘back then’. If only we could recover some golden age, we could restore our countries to glory. We could make America great again. Think about Vladimir Putin, who speaks of the greatest tragedy of the 20th century as being the collapse of the Soviet Union. Think of Xi Jinping in China who now speaks constantly of the 100 years of humiliation, the 100 years of domination of China by foreign powers extending back to the Opium Wars. This is not just a resurgence or a rise of China; it is seen by many as a revenge of China. These are people who draw on historical grievance. These are people who fashion identity around historical grievance. Identity based on us and them. Not the universalism imagined by Fukuyama of a world brought closer together, but a world divided. [Name], the Indian philosopher and economist, has called this solitarist identity. Solitarist identity. He says this is identity that kills.
As a reporter for more than three decades travelling the world, reporting the world’s great conflicts, I’ve seen this firsthand. Think of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, think of the blood feud of Shia and Sunni Islam. Think of Hindu and Muslim; the existential nuclear stand-off between Pakistan and India. North and South Korea. Identity sits at the core of so many of the conflicts of our world, and identity is driving the politics of our age.
It was identity that led Hilary Clinton to speak of the white working class in America who voted for Donald Trump as deplorable. It was identity that brought these people together to put Donald Trump into the White House. When he said America first, he spoke to them. It was identity that lay at the heart of the Brexit vote, where people in Britain decided that they would exit the European Union – that the great cosmopolitan universal idea of our age could not stand. It is identity that has seen a resurgence of the right across Europe. It is identity that has led to the Alternative for Germany as now the second-most successful and powerful party in the German Parliament. It is identity that has seen Marine Le Pen and her National Party achieve their highest vote ever in France. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, now in the parliament with the highest representation that his party has ever had.
This is a blowback. It is an anger at globalisation. It is a challenge to democracy. Democracy now is in retreat. Democracy does not die, necessarily, from outside, but it also dies from within where we see a weakening of the soft guardrails of democracy – a loss of faith in institutions, a loss of faith in our courts, a loss of faith in our governments. In Australia, we have not been immune. We’ve seen a resurgence of politics here on the fringes as well. We live in a volatile political age. More than a third of people at the last election cast a ballot for someone other than the two major political parties. The Senate is controlled by the crossbenchers. We are throwing out governments with regularity, both at a state and federal level. We are turning over political leaders at a rate unseen. We are constantly in opinion-poll mode. Politics is captured by the fringe. There’s been a hollowing out of leadership and a lack of appetite for reform. The Lowy Institute polled last year faith in democracy and found that for more than a third of Australians under the age of 25, they no longer believe that democracy is the best form of government.
China’s rise is a singular challenge to this age. China has been a remarkable story. I spent a decade reporting it, seeing a country that in my lifetime was once dismissed as the sick man of Asia, a country that could not feed itself, a country wracked by revolution that’s now on track to become the most powerful economy in the world. But I’ve also seen a country where I was locked up, detained, beaten up for trying to report the truth of that country where brave Chinese people stood up and were locked up for trying to speak the truth of that country. Where [name], Nobel Prize winner, died in a prison because he stood up to tell the truth. There is now a real challenge to liberal democracy, and it comes from an authoritarian capitalism.
China is rewriting history. The idea that economic growth would lead inexorably to liberalism and democracy is being turned on its head. China is a challenge to this age. The question now is, can our international bodies, can our multilateral framework, hold? Can it incorporate China as it should, as a powerful and important nation in this world? Or will we inevitably see a clash? Many people are now talking about what they call the Thucydides trap. The Thucydides trap dates back to the Peloponnesian Wars and it says this: that a rising power will meet a waning power and it will lead inevitably to conflict. Fifteen times, we’ve seen this happen across the course of human history and more than a dozen times we’ve seen it lead to conflict.
1914, the rise of Germany and the waning power of Great Britain tipped the world into a bloody conflict they called the war to end all wars, and then a generation later they did it again. There is real concern that perhaps we are sleepwalking to another war. These are hard times. These are perilous times, and these are the times we need people like you to step forward and to show us a different way – that you bring what you’ve learned here to shine the light into the world.
More than 150 years ago, a French philosopher and historian, Ernest Renan, posed this question: what is a nation? What is a nation? What binds us together? What, for all of our differences, keeps us together in peace? A nation, he said, is not defined by race. A nation is not defined by language. A nation is not defined by religion. A nation is not bordered by its mountains and its rivers. A nation, he said, is a collective will. A nation, he said, is a daily referendum where we ask ourselves: who are we going to be? What does the daily referendum of our time tell ourselves? Are we a nation riven by identity, divided by our politics, torn apart? Are we a globe retreating from democracy? Is this what it means to say we belong to a nation today?
Ernest Renan looked at the question of history – history that can sit at the heart of toxic identities that we are seeing driving so much of the conflict in our world, and he said history can tear a nation apart. A nation, he said, is built on as much on what we are prepared to forget as what we remember. As much on what we are prepared to forget as what we remember. We always choose – we choose the things that define us. We choose the things to commemorate. Why do we elevate ANZAC Day over Kokoda? We choose these things that tell us who we are. We choose the monuments, we choose the statues, we choose the national days, we choose the flags and the anthems that tell us who we believe we are.
It’s a challenge to our age. Do we build nations on unending historical grievance? Do we tear ourselves limb from limb on identity based around a sense of us and them, or do we reach for something greater, and what are we prepared to forget? Not forget as in amnesia – not a wiping out of history, but a choice that we will elevate our sense of civic identity above a history that divides us. What questions does that ask of us in Australia today? Australia, where we still live with the scars of our history, that my people – Indigenous people – still bear the scars of that history. We’re the first peoples of Australia, despite the undoubted success that I’ve had and so many others, statistically, still die 10 years younger than the rest of the population, still chronically over-represented in our prisons and still have the worst health, housing, education and employment outcomes of any other people in Australia. The first people of Australia, who still live with the weight of that history. What are we prepared to forget to build a nation?
For us, it is overcoming what Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet, once called the memory of wounds. He said perhaps all memory is the memory of wounds. For Australia, it is opening its eyes to a country that is older than 200 plus years, that dates back tens of thousands of years, that incorporates that story into the heart of this nation’s story, that finds a place for the first peoples of Australia at the heart of this democracy. In the introduction, it was pointed out to you that I was part of the Referendum Council where we travelled Australia trying to find a pathway towards answering this question: what is a nation? What is the Australian nation?
Indigenous people spoke with a powerful voice at Uluru – the Uluru Statement. And it called for several things: it called for a reckoning of our history, for a truth and justice process, a cathartic process, not a process of shame and blame but a process of opening ourselves up to a truth. Remembering to forget. It asked for a coming together, a [word], a Yongu word that speaks of peace after a battle. And it asked for an Indigenous voice to be inserted into the Constitution of Australia so that Indigenous people may have a voice, they have input into policy directed toward them.
That’s what it asked for, but it was asking for much more than that. It was asking to complete the story of a nation – that a people excluded from this democracy, that a people who had walked the farthest distance and carried the heaviest load would walk that extra mile for the other people in Australia, would see a future for Indigenous people in Australia in the heart of the very constitution that, when it was written, excluded them. It hasn’t come to fruition, but hope has not dimmed that one day it will find its place in Australia. That we will find a way to speak of ourselves as a nation with a deep tradition at its heart that incorporates the British settlement and everyone else who has come here since.
At a time when democracy is in retreat around the world, at a time when we are riven by tribalism, at a time when we are closer together yet as divided as we have been, here were a people offering a gift to Australia. This was Ernest Renan’s idea of finding a collective will. This was asking us what we believe in. This was our daily referendum. This was asking us who are we as a nation? These are the questions I want to leave with you today as you take your place in the world and take everything that you’ve learned here to make not us a better country but the world a better place. Thank you so much.
About the Speaker
Stan Grant is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Chief Asia Correspondent and host of the flagship current affairs program Matter of Fact. He is one of Australia's most respected and awarded journalists, with more than 30 years’ experience in radio, television news and current affairs.
Stan has established himself as an authoritative national voice on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, having been appointed to the Referendum Council which handed its final report to the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in June 2017.
Stan served for a decade as a Senior International Correspondent for Cable News Network (CNN) in Asia and the Middle East.
In 2015, he won the Walkley award for columns written for the Guardian Australia on Indigenous affairs, and in 2017 Stan joined the ABC as editor of Indigenous Affairs and fill-in host of nightly current affairs program 7.30.
Stan is an award-winning and bestselling author of several books, including ‘The Tears of Strangers’ and ‘Talking To My Country’, and is a regular contributor to a variety of major Australian news media.
Stan has recently been appointed to a senior academic post with Charles Sturt University as the Chair of Indigenous Affairs. He is also the Indigenous Affairs editor and contributor for the Guardian Australia, a presenter on National Indigenous Television (NITV), which he helped to launch in 2016, and the International Affairs editor for Sky News Australia.
In 2016, Stan was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of New South Wales. Stan completed his studies at both the University of New South Wales and the Australia National University.