By Paul Zanetti, newspaper cartoonist

ABC host Stan Grant cries wolf over racism one too many times, quits ABC

Stan Grant comes from a minority racial community. He says he faced racism. So did I. As have millions of others.

Stan faced racism as a white man with aboriginal background. I faced it as a wog dago. My surname was a curse, in that it made me a target in the 1970s. I wasn’t ashamed of my surname, but was called all sort of names I can’t repeat here.

My way of handling it was to laugh it off. I picked up a pen and taught myself how to draw cartoons.

Before long there were cartoons of the ‘racists’ pinned up on the school notice boards. It wasn’t long before they became my mates. I figured that’s how you did it in Australia. We wogs learned how to fit in, to integrate. These ‘racists’, well, they were only kids teasing as kids do – ribbing each other in the bus line, but watching each others’ backs on the footy field.

I’ve loved integrating ever since. Newspaper editors around the country also seemed to like the way I integrated. In fact it wasn’t an editor who first took notice of the cartoons of this wog kid with a funny last name.

It was a racist Australian bloke called Larry Pickering who in 1976, as a then 34 year old national superstar cartoonist on The Australian told this 15 year old wog kid from Wollongong who he’d just met, to “Keep at it, chief. I reckon you’ve got what it takes.”

A couple of years or so later, that racist Pickering bloke introduced me to an editor and a news organisation boss – and by 18 I was sitting in my own little office drawing daily cartoons at The Tele.

Funny how that racist famous bloke took no notice of my name. He looked at my work and judged me on what I did, not my ethnic background.

I became accepted into many racist Australian homes as the daily cartoonist in the country’s largest circulating racist daily paper. What a country where a wog kid could be accepted not on his background but what he produced.

But Stan Grant says the “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.”

I say bullshit, Stan.

I say you’re a divider, a segregator and an opportunistic antagonist promoting the ‘Guilt Industry’ that separates Australians into tribes.

You’ve been given every opportunity, Stan, without any barriers of racism – the same opportunities offered to every Australian of every race, if they’re prepared to study and work hard.

As have I, as have millions of other Australians and fellow wogs, from every culture, race and religion.

In that respect you and I are no different to millions of minority individuals who collectively come together as one, around this wonderful country.

Where you and I are different, Stan, I was a target as soon as someone heard or read my name. You never had that problem. Your name is as white Anglo as it comes – Stan Grant.

You enjoyed all the opportunities and benefits of the ‘white man’s’ system. As did I.

According to your online bio after you left Griffith, you went to uni, first in NSW then the ANU, where I’m assuming you weren’t held back by any racism, because you don’t mention it, and you’d be the first to scream about it if it happened.

You got a job as a copyboy at the racist Canberra Times, spent a few years as a news presenter on racist Macquarie radio, then the racist Seven network and the racist ABC.

You then moved onto stints with CNN International in Hong Kong and Beijing, where you were responsible for the network’s coverage of China. No racism there either. Page 2/

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