Chicken run

Chooks, gallus gallus domesticus, chickens, hens, whatever; as someone who’s spent many hours observing them, I can confirm they’re deeply weird birds. If chook watching isn’t your thing – and let’s be honest it’s not something everyone’s putting on their CV – bear with me dear reader.

There’s a reason we use the word chicken to describe anything involving cowardice, largely because chooks aren’t exactly known for having the courage of a lion. Chooks can also be affectionate and beautiful birds, but for the most part, when left to their own devices in a flock, they become hysterical alarmists that will run for their lives, one after the other, after the other, their necks stretching, their wings outspread in panic at the merest hint of anything testing their mojos.

It usually only takes one chook to freak out and turn on its chooky legs at the sound of an imaginary flapping sheet, before the others run with it, unquestioningly. Chooks never bother checking for themselves to see what the phantom drama is, they don’t hang around or stand their ground. At the slightest whiff of anything, the mass of Chicken Littles will decide the sky is falling and all race together in a quivering, hysterical throng. 

Which naturally brings us to the recent behaviour of Australia’s cultural and political leaders. Well, alleged leaders, and their collective display of feverish, unhinged chook-running in the face of the faceless Zionist lobby and even worse, the hidden hobyahs who dance to their bidding (hello Tony) dwelling in our politics and media.

Last month in the Lattouf v ABC court case, Australians were treated to a display of incompetence that might go down in the record books as one of the most staggering performances of mindless, group-think idiocy ever displayed at the ABC. It must have new ABC Chair Kim Williams (who despite The Guardian’s naivety, continues to oversee and approve the debacle) glowing with pride.

One after the other, the ABC’s senior managers took to the stand to explain to the taxpayers who fund their generous salaries, that none of them had any idea why a young, female Lebanese-Australian journalist was sacked, in fact they weren’t even sure she was Lebanese and if she was, then that’s not why she was sacked, because they weren’t sure she was sacked. She was just told not to come back to work and none of them seemed to know what that work was, or where the order for her not to return to work (a.k.a ‘sacked’) came from, or what they’d even had for morning tea that day, Your Honour. Gobble-gobble, the sky is falling, but nobody knows where the acorn came from. 

Parody then turned into farce with the appearance of the former ABC Chair, Ita Buttrose, who  from on high, assured the court and her fellow Australians that she hadn’t pressured anybody to sack anybody. In fact Ms Buttrose had no idea how this issue that she’d helped initiate, reacted to, and been a driving part of, had managed to involve her in any way and how on earth could she possibly know that her hints to remove Ms Lattouf would in fact result in the removal of Ms Lattouf. There must have been somebody else with the name Ita Buttrose hoping Ms Lattouf would go down with Covid or something, and nobody applied any pressure at all, what on earth were any of them talking about?

This ingloriously embarrassing charade of ABC executives who knew nothing and did nothing and reacted to nothing, living in a world where the waves of responsibility washed freely over the top of them, was played out in the Federal Court and livestreamed on YouTube to watching Australians who must have wondered how any of it came to be this stupendously bad. Watch those highly paid chooks run.

The reason it landed in court of course is because a small group of pro-Israel activists wouldn’t use the courts themselves, instead launching their Eternal Victim button and bombarding the ABC with complaints about Ms Lattouf’s social media, where she’d dared to object to Palestinian children being burned alive. The deeper truth was, however, they were objecting to Ms Lattouf’s existence.

Nothing in Ms Lattouf’s social media posts was lacking in fact or substance, in much the same way that Leigh Sales might argue that nothing in her social media posts during Covid lockdowns where she publicly and constantly questioned the actions of Dan Andrews, lacked fact or substance, or for that matter any number of ABC journalists who are allowed free reign to comment, post, write books and even host gigs for NSW Premiers on the side. 

The real problem with the pro-Israel email bombers was that Ms Lattouf had the audacity to be an AITM – Arab In The Media. The mere presence of a Lebanese woman in the media with an opinion contrary to theirs was enough to have countless organised Zionists flinging emails to Ita, ringing Ita, texting Ita, badgering the then Managing Director David Anderson and generally coordinating an attack on a working ABC journalist that should have – if anybody there had had the courage – seen the ABC pull down the shutters, protect their staff and tell the pro-Israel victim machine to royally fuck-off. But all our spooked executives could do was put their heads down, wings outstretched, and flee.

Much the same scenario engulfed the taxpayer funded Creative Australia last month, as they found themselves running in a familiar panic around the chook yard looking for a leader because somebody, somewhere, somehow in the pro-Israel lobby had decided another otherwise irrelevant acorn had fallen from the sky.

Lebanese-Australian (there’s those words again) artist Khaled Sabsabi had been announced as Australia’s representative to the 2026 Venice Biennale, the Olympics of the art world. His announcement came after much short-listing and eye-brow furrowing (but presumably, zero Googling) by the board of Creative Australia who’d confidently decided Sabsabi was exactly the type of artist they needed to present multicultural Australia to the world in 2026. CEO Adrian Collette gushed at the announcement on February 7 that Sabsabi’s work ‘reflects the diversity and plurality of Australia’s rich culture.’ 

Except six short days later – it didn’t.

On February 13, 2025, Mr Sabsabi, who was exactly the same artist he had been six days before, was dropped by Creative Australia because some forgettable Liberal Party politician had asked a two-minute question in parliament relating to an old artwork of Sabsabi’s that said politician clearly didn’t understand contextually, and the said board had clearly not bothered familiarising themselves with.

Enter into the fray, Labor minister Tony Burke who, regardless of his vague and evasive public utterances on the matter, has his fingerprints all over the push to unilaterally remove Sabsabi and thus create another moment in Australia where our cultural and political leaders have run about in a mass panic with their feathers flying at the vaguest threat of, well, nothing quite frankly.

That the mysterious pro-Israeli lobby was at it again, there can be no doubt – their first loyalty is to Israel, not Australia. Mr Sabsabi, a gently spoken man with an impressive body of work and a respected artistic reputation, was, it seems, yet another person going about their business in Australia while being Arab In Public.

What we were left with from this mess was one more expensive mop-up and ongoing and disastrous public controversy that shows no sign of ending – even while Australians fork out over $1 million a year in remuneration for Creative Australia’s board, a board who don’t appear to know how to use Google or stand by their decisions (see page 100). 

We are not so much being led by donkeys, as led by chooks. In fact, we’re being led by nobody. And these events have highlighted, we’re probably being led by a foreign country. Australia’s politics, Australia’s arts and Australia’s media are currently being manipulated by a foreign entity. Never mind the Chinese navy in nearby waters, bugger the Indonesians in our fishing zones; despite all the screeching headlines about those Murdochian issues, it is the Israeli government that’s currently controlling and interfering in our national discourse, controlling our arts sector and manipulating our publicly-funded national broadcaster.

And what do the people we look to as leaders do? Bow to them. Obey them. Bow and bend and roll over faster than a starving dog. What do their actions say about leadership in Australia, or the lack of it. What does it say about the competence of the people we pay to lead us? Australians have wasted millions of dollars on bowing to Israel’s demands, supported by chicken-headed decisions and pathetic management by a group of people with the moral courage of Henny Penny and the self-awareness of a sentient pile of socks  – and tragically, all of us will forever have to pay the price.