Understated probe misses mark

“May 2025 be the end of Israel. May it be the end of the US-Israeli imperial scourge on humanity,” Macquarie University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah posted on social media on Boxing Day 2024. A month later, The Australian revealed in January, Dr Abdel-Fattah, swathed in a Palestinian keffiyeh shawl, received an award at a controversial debate and symposium, Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action, hosted by the Queensland University of Technology’s Carumba Institute in Brisbane. The institute is QUT’s student support unit for Indigenous research students. After reports by Noah Yim and Natasha Bita in this newspaper about the anti-racist symposium revealed alarming attitudes among some participants, QUT engaged retired Federal Court judge John Middleton to review the event. His report, published on Wednesday, is so understated that it misses a crucial point. That is, the event overlooked the dangerous anti-Semitism (which threatens our society’s cohesion) and myopic outlook – evident during some of the event – that have infected university campuses, a trend that became clear after Hamas’s murderous attack on Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023, and in subsequent hostilities.

Dr Abdel-Fattah’s attendance, he notes raised concerns about the possibility, based on her previous public comments, of her “using hate speech of an anti-Semitic nature. This did not occur.” Her speech was hardly a model of restraint, complaining that her employer, Macquarie University, was “named after a genocidal coloniser and so I make sure whatever I do in this university is an act of resistance against that blood-soaked tribute … I look for ways to bend rules and refuse and subvert them.” For example, she had refused an Australian Research Council requirement to hold a conference as a condition of her latest $870,000 taxpayer-funded grant. Instead, she invited women to contribute “revolutionary quotes” printed on coloured paper, cut into pieces and put into jars similar to “being in primary school”. Such erudition.

As Bita reports on Wednesday, Mr Middleton cleared other controversial speakers. They included Jewish Council of Australia executive officer Sarah Schwartz, who mocked “Dutton’s Jew” – a send-up of former opposition leader Peter Dutton for politicising the Jewish community. The report also found Indigenous poet Lorna Munro had not intended to promote aggression when she urged delegates at the debate to “punch a racist” and showed slides of people being punched in the head. “She did not intend to promote physical aggression, but rather engage with cultural discourse through satire and exaggeration,” Mr Middleton wrote.

Media coverage and responses to the debate, he said, whether justified or not, damaged the reputation of QUT. We agree with his conclusion that the debate and symposium demonstrate the need for “more supervision over the public activities carried out by the Carumba Institute and by the university itself”. In light of events at this conference, and across campuses in recent years, we also agree with Mr Middleton that the QUT council should adopt a standard for itself and provide guidance to academics, staff and visitors on balancing “freedom of speech and academic intellectual freedom with the appropriate and lawful restrictions to prevent inappropriate speech or actions”.