One-sided literary fest offers no real contest of ideas

The intelligentsia get hold of bucket loads of other people’s money and invite their leftist comrades to address the like-minded. But Adelaide may just be the biggest stack of them all.

Adelaide Writers' Week in 2021. Taxpayer-funded literary festivals are often conservative-free zones.

Could the 2023 Adelaide Writers Week be the leftist stack to end all leftist literary festival stacks in Australia? For the moment at least?

Literary festivals in Australia are funded primarily by taxpayers via various federal, state and local government grants. There is usually some funding from business but the events would not be what they are without the support of governments – Labor and Coalition alike – dishing out taxpayers’ money.

They have developed into occasions where members of the intelligentsia, broadly defined, get hold of bucket loads of other people’s money and invite their leftist comrades to address the like-minded. Particularly in the area of nonfiction, they channel the ABC as conservative-free zones where essentially everyone agrees with essentially everyone else on essentially everything in a left-of-centre way.

I have been critiquing literary festivals in this column and my Media Watch Dog blog, among other places, for more than a decade. However, I have never seen a stack like this year’s AWW, which is directed by publisher Louise Adler. In my blog on February 10, I drew attention to the line-up of talent in the 2023 AWW’s Australian nonfiction area. It consists of almost wall-to-wall leftist and left-of-centre types. Not everyone fits into this category. But I wrote that there was not one conservative on the list.

It has since been drawn to my attention that Amanda Vanstone, who served as a cabinet minister in John Howard’s Coalition government, is on the program. On investigation, it turns out that Vanstone – who, by the way, would not call herself a political conservative – is chairing a session called “Food for thought or thought for food?”. Needless to say, it’s all about cuisine.

Elsewhere in the line-up are former Labor parliamentarians and staff such as Steve Bracks, Bob Carr, Gareth Evans, Maxine McKew, Anne Summers, Wayne Swan and Don Watson. Bob Brown (Greens), Sarah Hanson-Young (Greens), Simon Holmes a Court (who backed the teals against the Liberal Party in the 2022 election) and ACTU secretary Sally McManus are also on the program.

Unlike Vanstone, none of this group is expected to discuss what the program lists as “flavours and cooking”. Nor do such usual suspects (to borrow the saying popularised in the 1942 film Casablanca) from the Guardian Australia-ABC axis who are on the AWW line-up, including Sarah Ferguson, Jonathan Green, Tony Jones, Louise Milligan, Katharine Murphy, Lenore Taylor and Laura Tingle.

Adler has just started a three-year term as the AWW director. But the program was no more balanced last year when the festival was curated by Jo Dyer – who contested (unsuccessfully) the 2022 election as a teal candidate in Boothby, supported by Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 movement. The Liberal Party lost the seat to the Labor Party, which won on Dyer’s preferences.

In short, there was not one political conservative on the platforms of the taxpayer-funded literary festivals held last year in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and more besides. After all, this is what passes for normal on such occasions. You would only find conservatives on platforms at these events if they got lost looking to go somewhere else.

What’s newsy about the 2023 AWW is the overseas talent. Certainly there are some interesting guests on the line-up – such as Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, American-British financier Bill Browder, British journalist historian Ben Macintyre and British playwright Tom Stoppard. However, attention and criticism has focused on the debate – or, rather, lack of debate – about the Israel-Palestine issue.

The stack at the 2023 AWW is no more evident in that – as Justin Amler and Tammy Reznik wrote on this page last Saturday – there are seven writers “listed as being from Palestine – and none from Israel”. But, as they also pointed out, this is only part of the problem. At least two of this group have made statements about Israel, Israelis and Jews that would have seen anyone else making similar comments with respect to an Islamic nation or Muslims deplatformed within democratic societies. Any member of the AWW staff who bothered to do a web search would have known the appalling anti-Semitism in the works of two of the seven.

Mohammed el-Kurd was quoted in The Times of Israel in April last year as running the trope that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children as part of their religious rituals. This blood libel goes back centuries and found expression during the Nazi dictatorship in Germany.

Then there is Susan Abulhawa, who is on record as stating that “it’s possible to be Jewish and/or a Nazi at the same time – it’s called Israel”. She also has written that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is “trying to ignite World War III” and that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is trying to “de-Nazify Ukraine”. Zelensky is Jewish.

When the news spread about the appearance of el-Kurd and Abulhawa on the 2023 AWW platform, two Ukrainian authors (currently based in London) announced that they were withdrawing from the festival.

Moreover, South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas said he would not attend any AWW function and a corporate sponsor disassociated itself from the event.

But Adler dug in. She has now presented herself as an advocate for free speech and declared, “I don’t want us to be party to cancel culture.” The reference was for calls for el-Kurd and Abulhawa to be dropped from the line-up. This overlooked the real issue; namely, that there is no balance in the AWW program that would make it possible for the views of this anti-Semitic duo to be contested.

It would seem that Adler is delusional about the controversy. On February 16, she told the ABC Radio National Drive program that the AWW stood for free speech and added: “If we only come together to agree with each other we might as well forget having public conversations.”

Adler seems unaware that the 2023 AWW is virtually devoid of a political conservative and provides no genuine debate in the Israel-Palestine issue. Here’s hoping the intellectual debacle on the Torrens River this year leads to an end to the (boring) leftist stack that is the contemporary literary festival.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute. His Media Watch Dog blog can be found at www.theaustralian.com.au