Why is a Labor Premier silencing a writer? 

For many Adelaideans, Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) is the highlight of their year. A glorious six days when the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens in the heart of the city is transformed into an intellectual Arcadia in which great minds from the worlds of literature, journalism and the academy gather under the sun and plane trees to discuss ideas, books and the world. Unique amongst Australia’s writers’ festivals, AWW is entirely free, ensuring it is both accessible to all, and is a festival of discovery, where you are dazzled by Berlin intellectual Carolin Emcke while waiting to hear Leigh Sales, or become an early convert to an unknown Pip Williams because you missed Trent Dalton when you lingered too long at the coffee cart. They are proud that AWW was the world’s first literary festival, the one that Margaret Atwood promotes as having invented the form as we know it. They believe AWW says something important about their city – that curiosity, intellectual inquiry, the courteous and erudite exchange of a wide array of views and ideas are central to Adelaide’s civic life – and they fiercely protect its relaxed accessibility and openness.  

While miraculous quirks of timing meant AWW dodged the crippling COVID cancellations of Australia’s other major festivals, this year the Pioneer Women’s Gardens may stand empty thanks to the extraordinary intervention of Premier Peter Malinauskas. 

Facing an unloseable election in March, Malinauskas subjected the Board of AWW’s governing entity the Adelaide Festival to relentless pressure to overrule the now former AWW Director Louise Adler and veto the participation of Palestinian Australian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah in the program it had approved just weeks earlier. 

Festival organisers knew what this decision would mean and desperately tried to save their event, securing and sharing with the Board and Government assurances from ASIO and the police that AWW would be safe for all to attend, even with Dr Abdel-Fattah’s apparently threatening presence. Steve Bracks was enlisted to counsel the Premier against demanding a course of action that would torpedo one of his state’s finest assets. But the Premier was not for turning. He wanted Dr Abdel-Fattah out of the program and maintained pressure on the Board until a bare majority of them shamefully capitulated. An embarrassingly badly written statement prepared by the Premier’s go-to crisis comms man illogically and potentially libellously cited post-Bondi cultural sensitivities to justify their fateful decision.

The ensuing mass withdrawal of AWW’s other invited authors was as immediate as it was inevitable. Writers understand the importance of free speech and civilized debate even if politicians have forgotten. Writers understand that protecting a space for nuance and complexity is vital to our civic life even as politicians rely on sound bites and cliché. Writers understand that silencing voices with which you disagree is the first step towards tyranny even as politicians are frustrated by dissent.

Malinauskas used to understand this, too. He was applauded in 2023 for his strong view that Governments had “a profound responsibility” to ensure “freedom of speech isn’t compromised by cancel culture”. He rejected the idea governments should have any role in determining who is and isn’t programmed at writers festivals, however their views may grate or offend, arguing such intervention “takes us to some pretty dangerous places where governments act as a stifler of public debate, and that takes us down a path to wherever Putin’s Russia is.” He promoted the “whole idea of Writers’ Week” as being where we can “hear other perspectives, even if we don’t particularly like them”.

Where is that Malinauskas now?  

After wreaking havoc on one of his state’s most celebrated assets, the Premier is running for cover. “By law, I as Premier, am prevented from directing the Board to do anything”, he repeats incessantly, as if a direction is the only way the Government can influence members of a Government-appointed Board of a Government-funded organisation. Desperate to erase his central role in the fiasco that has brought the Festival to its knees, he deflects blame to the Board: “The people who run the festival which is the board, as they should, have got this into a pretty awful situation, which is unfortunate,”, he says, as if this “pretty awful situation” didn’t come about because the Board – to their eternal discredit – followed his implicit instructions.

With warrior Louise Adler now having resigned and four Board members having left – three in protest, the Chair in panic – the Festival is barely a functioning entity. It is in breach of its statutory requirement to have at least two men and two women on the Board, and it has long since abandoned its obligation under the Adelaide Festival Corporation Act to “to continue and further develop the Adelaide Festival of Arts as an event of international standing”. With their own actions they have inflicted unprecedented damage on the Festival’s global reputation, alongside our wineries one of the few South Australian organisations that even has a global reputation, let alone is celebrated as a leader in its field.  

And spare a thought for the Festival staff, passionate individuals who work long and hard for below-market salaries to transform the city each year with an event that entertains, provokes, challenges and inspires, who had successfully launched the impressive program of new Artistic Director Matt Lutton and were happily watching ticket sales grow steadily as the Festival drew nearer, only to have their work undermined, their livelihoods jeopardised, their organisation imperilled and their souls crushed by the leadership of the institution and state they serve. The coming days and weeks will reveal how many more artists will withdraw from Lutton’s debut program and thus the extent to which the viability of the Festival itself is impacted by the Board’s decision. 

Peter Malinauskas is a man of sport, not letters.  He spruiks South Australia as the home of the AFL’s admittedly excellent Gather Round, and sequesters its capital’s famed parklands for use by the blood-drenched Saudis’ LIV Golf. He has failed to grasp the central role festivals play in the life and identity of his Festival State – it’s in the name, Mali! – and in doing so has betrayed the legacy of Don Dunstan.  

It has long irked Malinauskas that he is best known nationally for a topless photo in a pool that showed off his surprising six pack, so perhaps he can find a silver lining in his new national prominence as Destroyer in Chief.  Not so the tens of thousands of his constituents who mourn his criminally cavalier handling of South Australia’s vital cultural assets.

Jo Dyer was the Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week from 2019 – 2022.