Diversity of views never occurred on Louise Adler’s watch as Adelaide Writers Week director

As is well known, Adler invited controversial Macquarie University academic and writer Randa Abdel-Fattah to this year’s AWW. The invitation was withdrawn by the festival board, some of whose members resigned when the majority decision was made.

Eventually all independent board members resigned and a new board was chosen by the South Australian government.

Attention had been drawn to some of Abdel-Fattah’s social media posts, which included messages such as “If you are a Zionist, you have no claim or right to cultural safety”. The definition of a Zionist is someone who believes in the establishment of a Jewish state in the ancestral lands of the Jewish people. Namely, Israel.

In the wake of the Bondi Beach terrorist massacre aimed at the Jewish community, it is understandable why some members of the festival board initially believed that this was not the time for platforming a speaker who has written that Zionists (Jews and gentiles alike) have no claim or right to cultural safety.

Adler, who is Jewish, is an avowed critic of contemporary Israel. Since she took up the position of AWW director in 2023, she has provided speaking opportunities to opponents of Israel (including the occasional Jew). In other words, there has been scant viewpoint diversity in the program on the Middle East, among other issues.

Adler’s decision was supported by 180 speakers who were scheduled to appear at the 2026 AWW and withdrew before the event was junked, including Australians such as Helen Garner, Jane Caro, Peter FitzSimons, John Lyons and so on. You get the picture. They, along with Adler, maintained that their gesture was a statement in support of freedom of expression in a democratic society. But was it?

Adler defended her position on 7.30 by accusing the Adelaide Festival board’s decision as an act of “cultural vandalism” that had been brought about by “the pro-Israel lobby”. She asserted that Abdel-Fattah had not been invited to the AWW “because of her social media feed” and that, in any event, “they’re certainly deleted”. A convenient cop-out, don’t you think?

But there was more. Adler went on to claim that “this is a moment where freedom of expression matters and that’s what’s at stake here”. What absolute tosh. Adler’s AWW functions have been essentially leftist stacks – as I documented in these pages on February 25, 2023, and March 22, 2025. The 2024 and planned 2026 events were no different. In a cover story for The Spectator Australia in April 2011, I defined writers festivals as occasions when “a group of leftists invite their leftist friends to perform before an audience primarily made up of inner-city leftist luvvies, at the taxpayer’s expense”.

In recent times, the most egregious examples of writers festivals as leftist stacks have been at the Sydney Writers Festival and the AWW. But the overwhelming majority reflect the Sydney and Adelaide events. If freedom of expression really mattered to Adler, she would provide a diversity of views – on Israel, Gaza and more besides. But this never occurred on her watch.

Writing in Adelaide’s The Advertiser on January 11, Adelaide-based Nicky Downer (an arts administrator of long standing) and Alexander Downer (the former Australian foreign minister) described the AWW as “a conservative-free zone” devoid of “viewpoint diversity”. A bit like the ABC. The Downers wrote that, when donating to the AWW in 2024, they asked Adler “about the lack of representation of more liberal/conservative views” in the program. Adler responded “that when she did ask someone from the right, they would invariably decline her invitation”, they wrote.

The Downers added: “Another (Adler) excuse was that people on the right just don’t write books; we suggested a few names, but when it came to settling the program, none were featured.” Adler’s excuse is simply false; political conservatives do write books.

Morry Schwartz, publisher of The Saturday Paper and Quarterly Essay, is no conservative.

He blames Adler for the disaster that has befallen AWW.

In a letter to The Australian on January 13 Schwartz wrote: “Adler knew well that including Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah … would endanger the institution. But it mattered nil to her – her obsessive cause is more important to her than our precious 66-year-old writers’ festival.”

Sydney business figure and arts aficionado Tony Berg (who was a member of the festival board) wrote to The Australian on January 15 in the following terms: “I am now utterly astonished at Louise Adler’s statement in her resignation letter in support of free speech. I am likewise surprised by Randa Abdel-Fattah’s invocation of free speech and her outrage at being ‘cancelled’. They both exhibit hypocrisy in defending free speech for some, when I observed them both to stridently oppose free speech during my time on the board.”

Berg reported that Adler and Abdel-Fattah succeeded in having New York Times columnist Tom Friedman deplatformed with respect to the 2024 AWW. This has not been denied.

As Elizabeth Pike reported in these pages on January 15, Abdel-Fattah was one of several high-profile figures who revealed personal details of 600 Jewish creatives. She commented at the time that the list provided “critical insight into how Zionists organise and operate in so-called progressive arts, academic and media spaces”.

Moreover, as Sharri Markson revealed on Sky News last Wednesday, when interviewed on the We Used to be Journos podcast on January 14 Abdel-Fattah declared that “Zionism should not be platformed”.

In announcing her resignation in The Guardian Australia on January 13, Adler opined that South Australia’s “tourism slogan could be ‘Welcome to Moscow on the Torrens’ ” – ignoring the fact that, from 2022, in Russia 30 journalists have been imprisoned, one of whom was killed. This makes Adler’s Adelaide/Moscow description somewhat delusional.

The same description can be applied to those who consider Abdel-Fattah a hero of the free speech cause.