MCA backs itself into corner over unwelcome guest speakers
Another dreadful call by an arts institution, this time Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which is roiling internally over an event that it’s holding under duress next month for a trio of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist activists. Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi is throwing this bash for International Women’s Day, but her guest speakers are Randa Abdel-Fattah and an artist-poet named Jazz Money.
Seemingly locked into the arrangement, the MCA board has been desperately thinking of ways to stop the ticketed event from proceeding. Spoiler alert: It can’t. Lawyers have picked through the contracts, the obligations, and it looks like the museum is legally bound to provide the space and oxygen and maybe even little IWD cupcakes with stickers and frilly bits of frosting on them to this triumvirate and their supporters.
Faruqi’s office began making the enquiries to book the venue last year, according to the MCA, which told us it was concerned enough about the event to contact Faruqi’s people and “remind them that they and their speakers are required to adhere to all federal and state laws and regulations, including race and hate laws at all times”.
You can see why the MCA would be concerned. Faruqi and Abdel-Fattah have perched themselves at the vanguard of an anti-Zionist movement that’s become a motor-force for anti-Semitic hate in this country.
Consider: authorities in Israel were still counting bodies in the days after the October 7 massacre when Abdel-Fattah changed her cover photo on X, formerly known as Twitter, to that of a paraglider, symbolic of the terrorists who flew them into Israel to embark on a murderous spree against civilians.
Abdel-Fattah’s support for those paragliders, who went on to rape large numbers of women, doesn’t really square with the gentility and sentiment of the women’s rights being celebrated at an IWD breakfast. Neither does gleefully ridiculing footage – as Abdel-Fattah did – of young men and women running for their lives at the Nova music festival.
This promulgator of unfiltered hatred has been emboldened enough to post comments online stating: “If you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety,” all while being amply funded from the taxpayer purse. Abdel-Fattah remains a recipient of an $870,000 grant from the Australian Research Council to research Arab and Muslim-Australian social movements. As our readers often ask in the comments: where is the DOGE???
Faruqi has repeatedly refused to say whether Hamas should be dismantled. She has played down the defacing of the Australian War Memorial with pro-Palestinian graffiti, calling that mere freedom of expression. She’s also reprimanded her chief of staff, Antoun Issa, a former Guardian journalist, for suggesting the Melbourne synagogue firebombing might have been a false flag operation.
You almost have to feel bad for the MCA, knowing that it’s been snookered by its own stupidity. Apparently a junior staffer took the booking last year and wasn’t sensitive to the tremors at the time.
The venue did, however, make sure to tell us that mere venue hire didn’t equate to an endorsement of views. “All event content, including speakers, presentations and any associated communications is the sole responsibility of the hirer,” the MCA told us in a statement.
Riiight. So, who’s up next guys – speakers from Hizb ut-Tahrir? The National Socialist Network?
Behind the paywall
Speaking of the MCA, its former director Liz Ann Macgregor keeps making the touchingly naive and disapproving point that all the reaction to the dumping of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino from the Venice Biennale can be attributed to “one newspaper article behind a paywall”, as she wrote in The Age on Friday.
Macgregor was referring to this column, of course, paywalled as we are. Three days prior she made an almost identical comment to The Guardian, complaining that politicians were “pointscoring” over Sabsabi “on the basis of an article sitting behind a firewall”. What is it Liz? Is paid-newspaper content somehow beneath you? Do we not matter? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
Paywalled or otherwise, Macgregor displays a remarkable innocence in not realising that press articles routinely shed light on matters of importance to a community, and these matters are sometimes raised in parliament by the people elected to represent those communities. And yes, we rely on a paying audience, not taxpayer subsidies – unlike, say, contemporary art.
Or maybe Macgregor – who specialised in a lifetime of elitism – hasn’t yet figured out that behind the national broadsheet’s paywall (or firewall) are readers of all stripes, including those who occupy seats of power and influence in the arts, in the corporate realm, in philanthropy, in politics.
And not all of them waste their time reading The Age, and the bulk of them definitely don’t read the bloody Guardian.
Unhappy choices
Want to build a major electricity transmission line in Victoria? Good luck. But that’s the job that will be handed to either gas pipeline owner APA or Brookfield’s Ausnet – and the Victorian government is unlikely to be happy with either.
The ultimate decision will be made by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), required to do the job under Victorian energy laws, but which is likely to (accidentally) get its own back on the Victorian government by handing Labor Premier Jacinta Allan a whole new bunch of headaches.
We’re talking about VNI West, which will cost – in theory – about $4bn on the Victorian side of the transmission line project alone.
VNI West will put new power lines between NSW and Victoria, lest bushfires wreck the national grid again as they did during 2020’s Black Summer crisis. In theory, it will also link up new solar and wind farms to the national network.
Tenders for the project are being run by AEMO subsidiary Transmission Company Victoria, which will be handed over to the Victorian government after contractors are appointed (and presumably flogged off the private sector after public money pays for the lines).
But so toxic is VNI West that even the lure of $17bn of federal money for transmission lines meant most of the major construction companies in the country didn’t want to know about it.
Not AEMO’s fault, to be fair. Due to the way Victoria’s energy laws work, it has been left running a contentious tender process to build transmission lines that will run across some of the state’s most fertile farming communities.
The result is that the multibillion-dollar task of building the state’s most important new transmission line now comes down to a choice between a company that has been at loggerheads with the Victorian government for years, and one that is so widely hated in regional Victoria that it almost derailed state’s entire plan to add renewable energy to the east coast grid.
Margin Call hears the last remaining parties in the mix are APA, partnered with French state-owned utility EDF, and Brookfield-controlled Ausnet – which owns the rest of the state’s 6000km-long electricity transmission network.
APA is best known for running gas pipelines, and has been at loggerheads with Victoria’s Labor government over gas policy for years – in particular the state’s 2023 decision to ban the installation of new gas cooktops in Victorian homes. That decision reversed in late 2024, after intense lobbying from the gas sector (including APA), to considerable disquiet in backbench Labor ranks.
And EDF? Largely responsible for the disastrous blowouts and delays at the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in the UK. Watch this space if Peter Dutton becomes prime minister.
The only real alternative is Ausnet, loathed in regional Victoria for botched consultation over its own Western Renewables Link transmission line project. So hated is Ausnet that Victorian farmers refused to let its staff on their land.
But Ausnet’s Western Renewables line also makes up a substantial portion of VNI West, putting it in the best position to make the cheapest bid, given it’s already doing a large section of the work.
Expect a major backlash in regional Victoria if Ausnet wins.
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