Is there a way forward for Australia’s cultural life after the cancellation of the 2026 Adelaide writers’ week and all the other controversies played out over the past year, in which the custodians of our culture seem to have crumbled under pressure, only to kinda, sorta and belatedly rally?
I hope so, but it will take a more than rhetorical reflection on what we mean by freedom of speech, and what it requires of us.
As we have seen, defending the right of people to speak, even when we deeply disagree with them, is very, very difficult.
Many people – perhaps most – can’t manage it. It can feel like a betrayal of self, a betrayal of values, and certainly a betrayal of one’s community or cause.
Nor is it sensible to expect it of everyone. But we must demand it of the custodians of our culture. This is the way forward.
Our own problems are, frankly, at the lower end of difficulty. We are, after all, an extraordinarily safe community, even given recent events.
I remember another writers’ festival I attended in Myanmar in 2015, during what proved to be a brief interregnum of a moderately authoritarian regime between brutally repressive ones.
There, among the writers, were those who had cooperated with the previous regime, even written its propaganda, alongside those who had been jailed and tortured by that regime.
Understandably almost every day one group or the other had threatened to walk out if the other were not cancelled. There was nothing cosy or comfortable or culturally “safe” about the exchanges.
Yet the festival proceeded, the exchanges were had, and there was no violence. That was a very good thing – a shining moment in history, perhaps. Within Myanmar the memory remains a talisman of hope.
So what do we mean by freedom of speech?
Consider two statements. In 2014, George Brandis – then attorney general – said in parliament that people have “the right to be bigots”.
Thirty-two years earlier, one of his predecessors, Justice Lionel Murphy, said in a high court judgment that Percy Neal, an Indigenous man and chair of the Yarrabah Aboriginal council in northern Queensland, was “entitled to be an agitator”. He had been sentenced to jail for spitting at and verbally abusing a white man.
“If he is an agitator, he is in good company,” said Murphy, before going on to quote Oscar Wilde: “Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them … Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.”
Both Brandis’s remarks and those of Murphy concerned freedom of speech. And they illustrate what it does and doesn’t mean.
A right to freedom of speech is fundamental, though most of us, including myself, recognise there are limits around inciting hatred and violence. And so we should.
But it is not a right to be taken seriously, to be regarded with respect, or to have others refrain from disagreeing with you. Nor is it a right to be “platformed”, to use the ugly modern verb.
A bigot is entitled to be a bigot, but part of moral political and cultural leadership is to make clear that some speech is not to be admired or respected or given a privileged place.
And part of such leadership is to recognise that the speech of the oppressed will rarely be polite, or comfortable.
That is why we have editors, directors, curators and boards – of the ABC, of art galleries, of media publications and writers’ festivals. They make the judgments on who deserves not only to speak but to be in a privileged position to be heard.
They have a greater responsibility than ordinary citizens to tolerate and “platform” uncomfortable views.
To take the current example, Randa Abdel-Fattah is an agitator, in Murphy’s words. As she is entitled to be. She is also a writer of many years’ standing, and an academic, who has recently written a favourably reviewed novel that directly addresses some of the issues that have placed such a strain on our public life.
She is a perfectly reasonable person to invite to a writers’ festival, in my view. Which is not to say I agree with everything she has said and done. It should be obvious that that is not the point.
Likewise, Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer prize winner and a weekly columnist for the New York Times. His record justified an invitation to the festival in 2024, though I was horrified by the repugnant column that prompted Abdel-Fattah and others to petition he be removed.
We might accuse Abdel-Fattah of being a hypocrite for seeking to remove him, while defending her own right to speak. Similarly, pro-Israel activists who sought to cancel her, while defending their own right to speak, might be regarded as hypocritical too.
For both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel activists, allowing the other to be “platformed” without protest must be close to impossible – an assault to the sense of self and, yes, an assault to “cultural safety”.
But the custodians of cultural life must meet a high standard. They must be up to the largely thankless and extremely difficult job of practical implementation of freedom of speech. That is, exercising wise judgment and then holding the line.
The problems we have seen – at the ABC, at Bendigo, at Adelaide and elsewhere – flow from custodians who have not understood this, or not been up to the job.
Sadly governments have been very careless in appointing the boards of cultural institutions. Sometimes such positions have been used as rewards to cronies. Or they appoint nice people, who crumble under pressure. Or good people who simply don’t understand the nature of the task.
Culture is not necessarily nice. Niceness is not enough. To be a cultural custodian takes intellectual rigour, moral muscle and courage.
Governments must take notice. These jobs should be held by the best of us. The judgment, strength and courage required are extraordinary. Yet on them the health of our national conversation, our democracy and the nature of our country depends.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group
