I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven Am. It started with the removal of a Palestinian author from Adelaide Writer's Week and ended with the cancelation of the entire event. The writer at the center of it all is Runder Abdulphutter. Last week, the festival board said she'd been dropped for cultural sensitivity after the Bondai terror attack. The decision sparked a massive backlash, with more than one hundred writers pulling out,
including literary superstars and world leaders. Now the program director and the festival board have all resigned and Australia's most important writers festival is off today.
In Daily, journalist Helen Carracolac.
On questions of political influence and what the cancelation means for the future of the arts. It's Wednesday, January fourteenth. Helen, thanks for speaking to us. When did you first get wind of this story?
So I closely monitor arts news in essay, and Writers Week in particular has had controversy around it in the past. So I was monitoring the Writer's Week website last Thursday on January eighth, and I noticed that the author doctor Randa Abdolpheta. Her picture was removed from the website and shortly after the festival board put out a statement confirming
that they had removed her. So we jumped on this immediately because we knew as one of the most high profile literary festivals in the country that this would be huge.
How did the board justify its decision?
So in the statement they said that it would not be culturally sensitive to program Randa after the Bondai attacks. But to be honest, we really haven't heard much from the board at all, and it's really unclear what they've been thinking in the lead up to this.
Can you tell me a bit more about Ruanda absolut flutter? Who is she? Why she become so controversial?
Yeah?
Absolutely so. Ruanda is a Sydney Bourne, Palestinian author. She wrote a novel in twenty twenty five called Discipline. That's what she would have spoken about at Adelaide Ryder's Week and Discipline is a novel that follows an academic and a journalist navigating censorship in the wake of Israel's war
on Gaza. But she's been targeted because of past comments that she's made and other media and critics point to things like social media posts where after the October seven attacks, she had a picture of a Palestinian paratrooper as her profile picture. But Randa has made it very clear that she's not anti Jewish, and she objects to what's happening in Gaza and towards Palestinian people, but that she is not anti Semitic.
Indeed, the first email that I received simply said that I was being disinvited because of cultural insensitivity, because of cultural sensitivities. It was only when I read the statement on mind that I even learned about a reference to so called past statements. And you know, a matter of basic procedural fans as a former lawyer, but i'd be entitled to know what those statements are.
Yeah, they've not specified which ones at this stage from anything I've seen. Have you?
Do you believe you've made statements which are antisemitic?
No? Never, I reject that wholeheartedly. I stand for the principle that we are all equal. I stand for the rights to do Palestinians, Muslims, everybody of every racial and religious group to live in freedom and equality and dignity. I am simply a Palestinian who has a father who is dispossessed of his land. I'm the daughter of a refugee who is calling for an end to sett a colonization, apartheid, in genocide. What's so wrong about that?
And very quickly after it was revealed that the board had axed Abdul Fatta La and more writers started pulling out. Who are some of them? And how significant was it?
It was extremely significant, And this happened very quickly and it was changing by the minute. So within hours of the announcement we had about thirty that pulled out. First we had Peter Grest, who's a very well known journalist for the time that he spent captive in Egypt. We had Mars Franklin Award winner Michel de Kretza. We had Jana Savara Farkas, the Greek finance minister who's also an author,
Zadie Smith. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda r Dern has also dropped out, and the nationally loved authors Helen Ghana and Trent Dalton were among them as well.
It's pretty hard to have a Writer's Week without Manny Ryders, though, so was it inevitable that eventually the Writer's Week wouldn't go ahead.
I think this was unprecedented, but not unpredictable. We knew that the writers would have a passionate reaction to this. We saw something similar happen at the end Togo Writers Festival recently as well, where writers were asked to sign a code of conduct which limited what they were able to speak out on and there was a boycott I
think of about fifty writers. Then this is definitely a politically charged environment and it's a shame because Adelaide Festival in twenty twenty five Writers Week alone had a record breaking one hundred and sixty thousand attendees and that was after forty years of programming this literary festival. The festival is free, which also means that more people come along and the writers have a better chance of making book sales.
This is going to have a massive impact on South Australia, both as our reputation as the festival state, but also because of the economic benefit that we're.
Losing coming up.
Even with the festival in crisis, the Premier still backs the decision to act runder abdulphutter.
Helen.
The South Australian Premier, Peter malinowskis he's been very vocal in supporting the board, and we learned that he spoke to the board before they made their announcement.
I made it very clear to the board, very clear to the board that I did not think it was wise to have someone who has been accused of anti Semitism at best or done it at worst, appearing at adlaied Ryder's Week.
Is that unusual and what is the connection between the state government and the Adelaide Festival.
Yeah, so the state government funds the Adelaide Festival and it is not as unusual as you might think for the Premier to have his say. He has made his view on certain Writers Week participants very clear in the past. In twenty twenty three, he also said that he disagreed with the participation of a Palestinian author. At the time, that author had said controversial things about Ukraine, which caused a few Ukrainian writers to pull out of the twenty
twenty three festival. But Malanowska said back then that he'd considered defunding it, but chose not to because he didn't want to take South Australia down a path where politicians decide what is culturally appropriate.
And Balanowskis isn't legally allowed to direct the board. But is there a sense that by making his position known he could have influenced them?
Well, this is where everyone is toing and throwing at the moment. So the Premier denies that he had influenced the board.
Once that board is appointed, that completely independent as a matter of law, as they well should be. That's a principle that I support. Some of your opinions sought or offered in this instance are both.
He said, though he made his opinion clear, he did not pressure them. And the thing that keeps coming up is that even if that's the case, the big question is if the board agreed with this decision, why did they resign?
Helen, What can you tell us about who was on the board that made the decision.
Yeah.
So, at the time the decision was announced, the board was chaired by Tracy Whiting. Some of their other members included a council representative, a ad laid airport manager, a lawyer, a journalist and public speaker. A big criticism of the board is that there were not any artists or people with arts expertise on it at the time. That this decision was made. There have also been leaks coming out left, right and center since this announcement. On Thursday, there was
a board member, Tony Berg. He is prominent in the arts locally and previously chaired the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce. So Tony Berg resigned from the Adelaide Festival board in October twenty twenty five, and in his resignation letter, which was leaked, very clear that he was against Randa's participation in Riter's.
Week, Helen.
Even as this whole situation's imploded, Malinowskis has really doubled down. Can you tell us what he said and how Runda Abdulphatt is responding.
Yeah, So, doctor Ruanda Abdulphetar has taken legal action. She's gotten her lawyers to already write to the board and request further information about why they made the decision to drop her. But the premiere. Although he has been clear that he did not politically interfere, he did make his opinion known after director Louis Adler's resignation on Tuesday. He said that if the situation were reversed and a Zionist
had carried out an attack at a mosque. He would also have held the same position and not let someone who was a Zionist speak at Writer's Week in the politically charge environment.
I mean, can you can you imagine if a far role it's honest, walked in to a city mosque a murdered fifty people. Can you imagine that?
As premier of this start, why would active.
Or support my far rights onest goron a writer as wor exposing where it towards seven pole?
Of course something.
The reverse is happened with substance.
I'm not going to support that.
All the direct quote from the premiere Randa has considered defamatory and is having emergency meetings with her lawyers about how she's going to proceed.
Yesterday, the South Australian Arts Minister announced new board members to replace those you've stepped down. Who are they and what do their appointments tell us about the future of the festival.
The new board members include an arts leader, a newsreader and a fine nets guru. So it's quite an interesting makeup. We've got the chair in Judy Potter, who has led this same board before from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty three. But the interesting one is Rob Brookman. Brookman is an interesting appointment because he was a signatory to a letter just a few days prior urging his predecessors to reinstate
Randa to the Writer's Week lineup. I think a lot of attention will be on him to see what the board does next. The new board is going to meet for the first time on Wednesday and sort of carve out a path for the twenty twenty six festival, which will not include Adelaid Rider's Week. They do seem confident that they'll bring back Adelaid Rider's Week in twenty twenty seven, but I think there'll be a lot of questions around what that looks like and who's able to speak.
The decision to program rund abdul Phutter in the first place was presumably made by festival director Louise Adler, and she's regularly invited pro Palace writers to her event in the past, and on Tuesday before it was canceled, she resigned saying she couldn't be party to silencing writers. Can you tell us more about what Adler had to say and about what this whole saga means for the future of artistic expression in Australia.
Yeah, so we knew early on that Adler and her team on the Riters Week's staff didn't agree with this decision, so shortly after the announcement last Thursday, there was an email that was leaked from the Writers Week programming team where they said they absolutely supported Randa and thought she was a valued participant. Then on Tuesday morning, when Adler
announced her resignation, she was pretty scathing. She called Adelaide Radaswiek the canary in the coal mine and warned her friends and arts colleagues that they should be aware of the future and wrote that they are coming for you. She said that the move is a threat to freedom of speech and this has created a world where lobbying and political pressure gets to determine who speaks.
Helen, thank you for joining us, thank you for having me. And just a note that the former chair of the Adelaide Festival, Tracy Whiting, is also a director of Solstice Media, the publisher of seven Am. Also in the news, Prime Minister Anthony Alberanesi is calling for Parliament to join together and pass an extensive bill changing offenses around hate crimes and tightening gun laws, saying Australia needs a moment of
national unity. The draft of the Combating Anti Semitism, Hate and Extremism Bill was released this week, which proposes to create new offenses, increase penalties for existing hate crimes and intant use additional security checks for anyone obtaining firearms. Labor will need opposition or crossbench support to pass the legislation, and Kevin Rudd's resignation as Australia's Ambassador to the United
States will be the end of his public life. The former Labor Prime Minister says he will conclude his posting on the thirty first of March to become the global president of the international relations group the Asia Society, and to head the society's Center for China Analysis. Prime Minister Anthony Albernezi has denied a fractured relationship between Ambassador Rudd and the Trump administration influenced the decision to step down a year early. I'm Nicole Johnston. This is seven am.
See you tomorrow.