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To understand what journalist Stan Grant’s “walking away” really means, we must remember where this particular story started: with the coronation.

In a discussion during the ABC’s coverage of the event, Grant made points he had made before about the monarchy’s ties to extermination and theft of land. Critics rounded on him and the ABC; social media filled up with racism. Broadcasting Grant’s comments was a terrible mistake, those critics said. Viewers should have been left in peace to enjoy the spectacle, not confronted with talk of violence.

Stan Grant has stepped back from the ABC.Credit: Jim Pavlidis

We often hear this type of reasoning, which is why we should pay attention to how bizarre it is.

The monarchy is not a musical – it is the ultimate power in our land. It is an institution this country voted to retain 24 years ago as part of our system of government. We might be accustomed to thinking of it as entertainment, but this is a way of kidding ourselves. Those watching the coronation were watching a political act. Much of the power of that act lies in its projection of continuity and stability, its intimations that Charles belongs to an orderly line of succession.

Don’t honest journalists have a responsibility to remind us of what that continuity means? That the history upon which Charles bases his claim to power contains things other than pomp and glory? Journalists who deny this responsibility to present a more complex, nuanced view of both the present and the past are failing in their role. They have become courtiers bowing down to power; precisely the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.

There is a facile phrase that often accompanies such outrage: this is not the right time. This was what was said when the Queen died. It is now what is said about the getting of a new king. We are permitted to talk about how wonderful the monarchy is, and that is all. Events that involve the monarchy are seemingly never the right time to talk honestly about what the monarchy stands for. This is an absurd rule – one of many our society lives by.

Another became obvious to me last year, when Grant was asked on budget night who had been left behind. The poor, he said. It was a surprising answer because budget nights are traditionally the time to talk about deficits and surplus and working families. This came back to me in recent weeks when poverty –finally – had become a central issue in budget coverage. Grant had beaten the rest of us there, and played a role in leading us there too.

A simple explanation for why Grant was able to see something most of us ignored is that he has himself experienced poverty; just as a simple explanation for Grant’s focus on our violent history is the fact he is Indigenous. But the fuller answer, I suspect, is that Grant’s personal history saves him from the fate that befalls most of us: of lazily accepting the conventions that govern a society, believing them to be immovable pillars. In Grant’s writing, his many interventions in our public debates, there is an insistence on duality – that things are not either this or that. It is unsurprising that he sees both the immense power that conventions have and also their odd fragility; the way they are built out of words and habits.

Good journalists understand that their proper concern is not only with facts but with power. Those in power will sometimes say that down is up, and it is the job of journalists to prove the facts are otherwise. Most of the time, though, power is more insidious. It decides which facts get attention, which facts we are allowed to discuss and when. These are not dictates laid down from on high. They come down to us through convention.

What Grant recognised when he spoke about the budget was the convention that we talk about the economy and those it benefits, but not those it excludes. They are left out of the economy and left out of the discussion.

The same impulse appears in those who want only good fun when they observe the ritual transfer of power on TV: those who have been targeted by that power, whose ancestors have been hurt or killed by that power, can talk some other time when those who benefited do not have to listen.

In Grant’s column on the event and its fallout he made many powerful points. He wrote of the racism he and his family had endured over time, and the “institutional failure” of the ABC to speak up for him.

He made a broader point too, and it is important it isn’t lost. He said he was walking away for a time not because of racism – he would not give racists the satisfaction – but because “our history” was “too big, too fragile, too precious for the media. The media sees only battle lines, not bridges.” The media had turned “public discussion into an amusement park. Social media, at its worst, is a sordid spectacle.”

Now, without Grant, that public discussion will be worse still.

Racism does most damage to those targeted. But it damages society, too, by shutting down voices that we need to hear. In doing so, it props up the tired conventions that hold us back and prevent us from grasping the world as it is – and how it could be. Grant may not be leaving because of the racism he has suffered, but you cannot separate racism from the broader point he makes about the awful state of media. With each voice lost we lose more nuance still.

Grant was failed by his employer, which effectively asked him to speak truth to power and then failed to support him. But he was failed by the rest of us too. When he was attacked, we did, in effect, what all those offended by his discussion of the monarchy did. We said, “Not now thanks, we’ll engage with racism when we choose to, if at all.”

The truth is that this column, and all the others like it, come too late: after Grant has walked away. Once again, Grant has challenged a convention, or a set of them. Around journalism, racism and how we talk about both. But it should not have been up to him alone.

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