Adelaide writers festival shambles
Adelaide Writers Week hypocrisy shows how our intellectual class is betraying Australian tolerance
In demanding a platform, Randa Abdel-Fattah seeks to convert into a right what is merely a privilege: a privilege whose sole condition is the mutual respect she has repeatedly rejected.That ought to be uncontentious.
Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott
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Randa Abdel-Fattah, who infamously changed her social media avatar to a Hamas terrorist parachuting into Israel on October 7, endorses a form of vigilante politics in which organised mobs intimidate or suppress the speech of real or alleged Zionists, whom she refuses to treat as fellow Australians.
8 min read
2:50PMJanuary 16, 2026.
Updated 11:59AMJanuary 18, 2026
It would be easy to dismiss the tempest surrounding Adelaide Writers Week as a storm in a teacup, stirred by serried ranks of second-rate intellectuals marinating in a steam bath of emotion. But the controversy exposes something far more serious: our difficulty in mastering the lessons of the crisis that has confronted Australian society since October 7, 2023, and that found its most horrific expression in the murders at Bondi Beach.
That crisis cuts to the heart of the assumptions underpinning Australia’s democratic order, notably the belief that our shared civic framework is sufficiently robust to contain – even discipline – the passions that inevitably mark a free society.
Central to that order is an expectation of self-restraint, ensuring that we treat one another with mutual respect so disagreements do not degenerate into brawls or dislikes into outright hatreds. Equally taken for granted is the conviction that, however searing our differences, they do not cleave the country into warring camps in which one side claims a licence to intimidate, silence, harass or even assault the other.
Laura Tingle and others epitomise the ABC’s indifference to its obligation to be, and to be seen to be, politically neutral. Picture: ABC
Yet none of these traits is a gift of nature. They are instead the hard-earned product of our history, which from the outset forced previously hostile groups of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish settlers to learn how to live together. By the 1850s, as self-government was being established and mass-suffrage democracy was sweeping through, a “democracy of manners” had begun to emerge – one in which settlers of widely differing origins were expected to treat one another with informal friendliness at best and laconic toleration at worst.
It would be absurd to claim that this standard was always met: no society ever has or will. But there was a substantial consensus about the standard itself, repeatedly affirmed by prominent churchmen, leading writers and the press. Indeed, for authoritative voices to denounce the norm as such would have been virtually unthinkable.
Instead, the period’s intellectual elites actively promoted civic education that inculcated habits of mutual respect and elevated them into a civic duty.
Learning how to be a good citizen
At the same time, the practices essential to democratic freedom were woven into everyday experience. To take just one example, Westminster rules and procedures proliferated through handbooks circulated across the colonies and were assiduously applied in the governance of the innumerable voluntary bodies that peppered the social fabric: friendly societies, mutual-improvement and progress associations, bowls clubs, debating and chess clubs, Mechanics’ Institutes, as well as the committees formed to run libraries, community halls, hospitals, schools and charitable institutions.
It was in these institutions, writes historian John Hirst, that Australians “learned how to be good citizens: to listen to opposing arguments, to respect the rulings of the chairman and to accept that voting decided issues”. A proceduralist ethos of mutual respect – so widely adopted as to “become second nature” – was thereby firmly embedded as a shared ideal in the nation’s democratic culture.
That culture has now been dramatically eroded, if not altogether shredded.
Most obviously, an Islamist rhetoric of religiously inspired hatred has been allowed to flourish, creating the conditions for escalating acts of intimidation and violence.
This rhetoric has been amplified by elements of the left that, animated by a deep hostility to the West, have lent their muscle to efforts to silence voices they detest. And far from standing firmly against such outrages, many of today’s self-proclaimed “creatives” – ranging from artists to academics – have excused them while openly defending their perpetrators.
We were unable to identify, for example, even a single instance in which Sarah Ferguson or Laura Tingle – both salaried employees of the ABC – publicly opposed any one of the 40 or so “cancellations” of Jewish artists, speakers and academics that have occurred since October 7, 2023. Their incandescent indignation at the decision to rescind Randa Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to Writers Week is therefore not merely another expression of the ABC’s indifference to its obligation to be, and to be seen to be, politically neutral. Like the statements issued by many of the other protesters, it is manifestly hypocritical.
‘A charade that has hardened into a fraud’
As for Louise Adler, who this week evoked the image of stormtroopers “coming for” her “friends and colleagues in the arts”, perhaps the most charitable assessment is that what was once a charade has hardened into a fraud, while what began as commonplace hypocrisy has degenerated into unabashed vitriol.
Louise Adler quit as director of Adelaide Writers Week in support of Randa Abdel-Fattah. Picture: ABC
That vitriol is compounded by something more basic: sheer ignorance. It was glaringly on display when Adler – who flaunts her Jewish identity – responded to Josh Frydenberg’s citation of Hillel the Elder’s famous saying (“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”) by accusing him of pretending that he was Moses, to whom she claimed the aphorism referred. In reality, the aphorism has nothing to do with Moses, a point that would be obvious to anyone familiar with the text or the extensive rabbinic commentary surrounding it.
The Hebrew word for hypocrisy, tsavua – literally “painted” – therefore seems exceptionally apt: it denotes an entirely vacuous core lying behind a carefully confected surface.
But hypocrisy is not just a character flaw; it subverts the evidentiary trust on which moral and civic evaluation depends. For that reason, Dante Alighieri placed hypocrites in the sixth Bolgia of the Divine Comedy’s Hell, as exemplars of duplicity’s vilest form: the masking of evil beneath the appearance of good.
Because hypocrisy works by cloaking deception in the garb of virtue, Dante’s punishment is exact. Hypocrites are forced to wear cloaks of dazzling beauty but of crushing weight – a burden that discloses the truth their surfaces were designed to conceal.
Deception draped in the language of free speech
Seldom has that judgment been more appropriate than here, where deception has been draped in the language of liberty of expression. It is, after all, indisputable that Abdel-Fattah – who scarcely pretends to be a disciple of John Stuart Mill – is no defender of free speech.
Rather, she claims freedom for herself while denying it to others. Worse still, she endorses a form of vigilante politics in which organised mobs intimidate or suppress the speech of real or alleged Zionists, whom she refuses to treat as fellow Australians.
As Abdel-Fattah frankly put it, “If you are a Zionist, you have no claim or right to cultural safety. And it is my duty as somebody who fights all forms of oppression and violence to deny you a safe space to espouse your Zionist racist ideology.”
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South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas was therefore right to observe that this advocacy of harassment and intimidation renders her an entirely unsuitable speaker, especially at an event supported by taxpayers, a group that includes the people whose safety she regards as legitimately expendable.
In demanding a platform, Abdel-Fattah seeks to convert into a right what is merely a privilege: a privilege whose sole condition is the mutual respect she has repeatedly rejected.
That ought to be uncontentious. That it has instead generated so much heat is deeply revealing. It highlights the essence of the issue we must now confront: how a liberal society, grounded in tolerance, should respond to those who invoke the freedoms it affords for the sole purpose of destroying them.
The conventional answer – central to what might be called the liberalism of hope – is simple: let them speak in a contest of views and the truth will prevail. But that answer founders on two well-known objections.
The first, stressed by eminent German philosopher Jurgen Habermas and by Frederick Schauer, who was the most prominent contemporary scholar of the US constitution’s first amendment, is that it mistakenly assumes speech can be cleanly severed from action. But speech, they argued, need not even cross the formal line into incitement to gravely threaten the civic peace.
No one understood the capacity of oratory to induce the descent into violence, while disavowing any responsibility for it, better than William Shakespeare. And nowhere is that capacity more starkly displayed than in Mark Antony’s speech over Caesar’s corpse in Julius Caesar.
In a text of remarkable brilliance – the speech is barely 1100 words long yet deploys 52 of the 90 major elements of classical rhetoric – Mark Antony “lets slip the dogs of war” while repeatedly proclaiming Brutus an “honourable man”. Stirred by the speech to cry “Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!”, the mob runs riot through the streets, murdering a harmless poet simply because he shares the name of one of Caesar’s assassins. Meanwhile, Mark Antony, coolly admiring his handiwork, remarks to himself: “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot.”
That incitement, which does not speak its name, has been publicly enacted time and again since October 7, albeit always far more crudely delivered.
The second problem exacerbates the first. The liberalism of hope not only assumes that speech will be deliberative – aimed at exposing truth rather than at preparing the ground for mayhem – but also that, once the contest of views has run its course, the losers will politely accept the verdict and lay down their arms, perhaps content to await a more favourable outcome next time.
Hard facts for a democratic society to confront
But the confrontation with jihadi preachers and apologists for Hamas is not a debating society. Whatever the outcome of any notional “clash of views”, they will continue – carefully treading the thin line between legality and illegality – along the path that has already helped supply the mood music for mass murder.
Those are hard facts for a democratic society to confront. They cut directly against our commitment to the widest possible freedom of expression, compelling the liberalism of hope to reckon with the liberalism of fear: the fear that the social compact earlier generations forged and that we were privileged to inherit will unravel under pressure from groups that openly despise it.
But it is also essential that any solution to the dilemmas that poses be narrowly and precisely targeted to the problem. That is where the proposed legislation released this week conspicuously fails. Rather than constraining the jihadis and their fellow travellers, it leaves Islamists free to peddle hatred disguised as scripture while creating a serious risk that legitimate criticisms of Australia’s failed multiculturalism will be stifled.
Nor is there any sign that the government is willing to address the deeper structural causes of the crisis, including an immigration program that lacks a credible capacity to screen out bigots, antisemites and fanatics.
Yet what is most dispiriting in all of this is not the government’s predictable missteps or even the conduct of the extremists, who behave as extremists always have. It is the abdication of judgment by those who claim the title of intellectual. That includes the Adelaide Festival’s new board, which – in what has now become a well-worn pattern – has supinely caved in to the howls of protest. In rallying unthinkingly to Abdel-Fattah’s cause, its members have confused noise with principle, indignation with argument and moral exhibitionism with courage.
They have, in doing so, cravenly repudiated the legacy they profess to cherish: a political culture grounded in respect for the conditions that make disagreement possible without violence. Their failure is no side issue of our present crisis; it lies at its core. When those charged, by office or vocation, with clarifying thought instead license intimidation, they do more than simply betray the Australian achievement of a free and tolerant society. They hasten its undoing. And for that they must answer – not to the confected fury of the moment but to the harsh judgment of reason and the verdict of history.
Henry Ergas is a columnist for The Australian. Alex McDermott is history fellow at the Robert Menzies Institute.