Adelaide Writers’ Week and the dangerous misuse of “free speech”

The collapse of Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026 has been widely described as a free speech controversy.

That description is convenient, but it is wrong. This was not a principled debate about the boundaries of expression in a liberal democracy. It was an institutional failure to draw a clear line between robust political argument and rhetoric that targets a minority community as a collective, then a predictable cascade of resignations, withdrawals, and reputational damage when that failure was exposed.

What happened is now well established. The Adelaide Festival board rescinded an invitation for Palestinian Australian author Dr Randa Abdel Fattah to appear at Writers’ Week. The board pointed to cultural sensitivities in the aftermath of the 14 December 2025 antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, and to Dr Abdel Fattah’s prior public statements, while also indicating there was no suggestion her work was connected to the attack. The decision triggered a mass boycott. More than 180 writers and speakers withdrew. Louise Adler resigned as director. Writers’ Week 2026 was cancelled. Most of the board then resigned.

That sequence matters, because it clarifies what this is actually about. Not whether the state can silence speech, but how cultural institutions manage responsibility, community safety, and public trust when speech becomes a source of harm.

Free speech is not the issue. Platform governance is.

Australia’s legal and cultural norms support wide ranging political debate. Criticism of governments, including Israel’s, is lawful and common. No serious person argues otherwise. The question here is different. When an institution confers status and reach through a prestigious platform, what standards does it apply to those it elevates?

That is not censorship. It is governance.

Every major cultural institution makes choices. It curates. It selects. It declines. It balances audience confidence, artist welfare, community cohesion, security considerations, and reputational risk. The trouble begins when those choices are explained with slogans rather than principles, and when the phrase free speech is used as a shield to avoid confronting the real issue. Whether certain forms of rhetoric corrode the safety and standing of particular groups in Australian public life.

The language problem cannot be wished away

This controversy did not arise from a single panel slot. It arose from a broader pattern of public rhetoric that many Jewish Australians experience not as political critique, but as social permission to treat them as uniquely undeserving of dignity, belonging, and protection.

One statement widely reported in the coverage of this episode is the claim that Zionists have no claim or right to cultural safety. That is not a debate about foreign policy. It is an assertion about who deserves safety.

In practice, Zionist is frequently deployed in Australia as a proxy for Jews. That is not conjecture. It is the lived reality of Jewish students and community members who are harassed not for what they have said, but for what they are presumed to be. When a public figure insists that such a group has no right to cultural safety, it does not remain an abstract proposition. It becomes part of the broader environment in which Jewish Australians are told, explicitly and implicitly, that their fear is illegitimate and their presence is conditional.

In the wake of Bondi, that environment is no longer theoretical. An antisemitic terrorist attack, at a Chanukah gathering on an Australian beach, tore through families and a community that had already been warning for years that Australia’s tolerance for intimidation, glorification and dehumanisation was normalising the unacceptable. When institutions and commentators treat this context as incidental, they do not defend free speech. They trivialise risk.

The solidarity question is not a distraction. It goes to credibility.

The news cycle has also revealed something else. How selectively some parts of our cultural class apply their claimed moral commitments.

In recent days, the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia publicly challenged prominent voices who rallied to Dr Abdel Fattah’s cause, calling on them to reconcile their solidarity with concerns raised about her commentary relating to sexual violence on 7 October. Whether one agrees with NCJWA’s framing or not, the underlying point is difficult to evade. Feminism cannot be credibly invoked as a brand or a posture when Jewish women are treated as an exception to the rules.

If the national conversation insists on asking only one question, is this censorship, it will keep missing the harder questions. Whose safety is taken seriously, whose harms are minimised, and whose trauma is treated as politically inconvenient.

The hypocrisy test. Who gets to call for cancellation?

There is another fact that sharpens this point. In February 2024, Dr Abdel Fattah was among academics who urged the Adelaide Festival board to rescind an invitation to New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman. The board did not remove him. That history matters, because it demonstrates that the act of challenging invitations is not new, and it is not confined to one side of politics.

What has changed is the way principle is invoked. When Jewish Australians raise concerns about rhetoric they experience as vilification, they are told to accept discomfort in the name of debate. When objections are raised to Jewish or pro-Israel voices, the language of harm and responsibility is more readily deployed. That double standard is not sustainable, and it is not moral leadership.

What Adelaide should teach us

Adelaide Writers’ Week did not collapse because Australians suddenly became hostile to dissent. It collapsed because an institution made a high-stakes decision, justified it poorly, and then discovered that a large portion of the sector would treat a reversal as a litmus test for ideological solidarity. The outcome was the worst of all worlds. A damaged festival, a fractured cultural community, and a broader public left with the false impression that the only value at stake was free speech.

If Australia is serious about resisting hate and preserving social cohesion, we need to be more honest than that. The core task is not to shout free speech louder. It is to re learn the difference between argument and dehumanisation, between political critique and collective scapegoating, and between platforming diversity of thought and mainstreaming rhetoric that makes minority communities less safe.

Cultural institutions can and should host uncomfortable conversations. But they must also be capable of recognising when discomfort is not the point. When the effect of rhetoric is to deny a group the right to be safe, to belong, and to participate in civic life without intimidation.

If we keep calling this a free speech controversy, we will keep learning the wrong lesson. The lesson is simpler, and more confronting. When we refuse to name harm clearly, we end up normalising it, and then we act surprised when it spills from the margins into the mainstream, and from words into violence.

Michael Gencher is the Executive Director of StandWithUs Australia