PETER VAN ONSELEN: How Albo has a surprising connection to the meltdown over a Palestinian writer getting un-invited from a writers' festival - sparking boycott by Peter FitzSimons and ABC types
The Adelaide Writers’ Week has managed the rare feat of turning what was supposed to be a literary festival into a full-blown political incident.
That’s thanks to a shambolic sequence of decisions, backtracking, resignations and legal threats.
The Adelaide Festival board disinvited Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from this year’s program, explaining it would not be ‘culturally sensitive’ to proceed so soon after the Bondi attack.
It was a line designed to calm everyone down. But the festival board dragged the worst antisemitic atrocity on Australian soil into a programming dispute, then tried to insist it wasn’t drawing a connection. All while simultaneously citing Abdel-Fattah’s ‘past statements’ as the reason for pulling the pin on her attendance.
That isn’t ‘cultural sensitivity’. It’s bureaucratic cowardice, dressed up as virtue.
But here is the part Adelaide’s cultural establishment still seems determined to avoid saying out loud: this was a mess waiting to happen because the good doctor never should have been invited in the first place.
Not because writers’ festivals should avoid controversy, or because robust debate is unwelcome, but because this particular controversy is not incidental to her public profile. It is central to it.
When a public figure repeatedly trades in inflammatory claims, moral absolutes and political agitation on a subject as combustible as Israel and Palestine, the organisers don’t get to feign surprise when a mess ensues.
Palestinian-Australian Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah was dropped from the Adelaide Writers' Week, with the board citing a need for cultural sensitivity following the Bondi massacre - sparking a massive fallout
A day after the October 7 massacre in Israel, Dr Abdel-Fattah updated her Facebook profile by sharing this image of a parachutist in the colours of a Palestinian flag
They don’t get to pretend they were curating a polite conversation about literature and accidentally wandered into the front line of a culture war.
What this fiasco really exposes is the comfortable little secret of too many writers’ festivals: they no longer curate arguments, they curate affirmation.
The panels are built around polemicists whose worldview is already shared by the organisers and their cultural tribe, while the occasional ‘opponent’ is wheeled in as a foil. Not to persuade, but to be tut-tutted. Or only because they have written critical works about their own ideological allies on the right.
The whole thing is then sold as brave, necessary, and challenging, when it is mostly just ideological brand management with a wine tent. Adelaide has not stumbled into the culture war by accident. It has been leaning into it for many years, while pretending it is simply celebrating books.
The difference here is that the board (for once) wasn’t on the same polemic page as the festival organisers. And the hypocrisy at the centre of this whole episode is hard to miss. Abdel-Fattah’s supporters now denounce ‘censorship’ as if the principle matters in the abstract, yet she herself was among academics who previously urged the festival to rescind an invitation to pro-Israel speaker, Thomas Friedman.
That sort of censorship happens all the time at these festivals, it just usually happens behind closed doors.
Free speech, it seems, is a virtue only when it protects allied voices. That is the really rotten aspect of all of this: institutions that want the moral status of pluralism, without actually embracing it.
If Adelaide Writers’ Week wants to be a political rally, it should say so and stop taking public credibility (and taxpayers’ money) on false pretences. If it wants to be a serious festival of ideas, it needs to stop programming like an activist newsletter and start trusting audiences to hear arguments they may not always like or agree with.
Author Peter FitzSimons - husband of high-profile TV anchor Lisa Wilkinson - joined the boycott of the festival
As did the likes of ABC journalist Louise Milligan and the national broadcaster's global affairs expert Laura Tingle
Either Abdel-Fattah was an appropriate invitee to begin with or she wasn’t. Writers are now withdrawing in their droves, sponsors have pulled out and the program has been plunged into complete chaos.
And the board itself has now cracked, with resignations raising questions about whether it can even meet legal requirements to govern the festival.
One of the board members who resigned is Daniela Ritorto, married to Mark Butler, the federal Health Minister and one of Albo’s closest parliamentary confidants.
The board’s decision was reportedly made without the input of Writers’ Week director Louise Adler or the Writers’ Week team.
And yet Adler remains in place, despite a public humiliation that amounts to a vote of no confidence in her role.
If Adler extended the invitation in the first place, and the board has now overridden her in a way that has shredded the event’s credibility, what exactly is she still directing? Why hasn’t she resigned on principle?
If Adler stays, she is the face of a festival that has stripped her of all of her authority. If she steps down on principle, she loses her well paid gig.
This whole mess is proof positive of why a Royal Commission into antisemitism is so necessary. The Bondi attack made the necessity obvious.
Health Minister Mark Butler is one of Anthony Albanese's closest confidants. His wife Daniela Ritorto quit the board of the Adelaide Writers' Week after it axed Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah
A royal commission can take the emotion out of this debate and offer some insights – and can hopefully examine whether or not anti-Zionism equates to antisemitism.
Adelaide’s implosion shows how far the rot might run through our civic culture.
No wonder the PM had to be hauled, kicking and screaming, into calling the royal commission. The government’s initial posture after Bondi was to reject calls for having one
Pressure grew, and eventually the Commonwealth Royal Commission was announced. Albo can insist it wasn’t a backflip but that’s a complete nonsense.
