The decision by the Adelaide Festival Board to exclude Palestinian Australian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide Writers’ Week on the grounds of “cultural sensitivity” is based on a dangerously broad and vague criterion for suppressing free speech.

The board appears to have overruled Writer’s Week director Louise Adler to remove Abdel-Fattah from the program, arguing it would not be culturally sensitive to include her so soon after the Bondi terror attacks, due to her “past statements”.

In response, more than 30 leading authors have withdrawn from Writer’s Week, which begins on February 28.

They include international headliners such as novelist and essayist Zadie Smith and Greece’s Yanis Varoufakis, Miles Franklin award-winning authors Michelle de Kretser and Melissa Lucashenko, and Australian Society of Authors chair Jennifer Mills, who called the decision “completely unacceptable”.

The board yesterday issued a statement setting the decision against the background of the Bondi terrorist atrocity of 14 December 2025, invoking what it calls “the current national community context” and what it sees at the festival’s role in “promoting social cohesion”:

Whilst we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s [sic] or her writings have any connection with the tragedy at Bondi, given her past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.

So the board’s position is that neither Abdel-Fattah’s writing nor Abdel-Fattah herself have anything to do with the Bondi atrocity. But because of some unspecified “past statements”, she is to be excluded in the interests of social cohesion and some vague notion called the “national community context”.

This decision goes far beyond the established standards embodied in the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it an offence to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” people because of their race.

It also goes far beyond the ordinary liberal standard articulated in John Stuart Mill’s

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