Adelaide Writers’ Week wreck: there are lessons for communicators:
1. The Board’s behaviour: Its job is to act in the best interest of the owners, the Adelaide Festival Corporation, not pursue personal agendas.
Louise Adler is the outspoken director of AWW, who resigned loudly over this brawl. That’s a no-no. Her role, with fellow directors, is to form a collective view. Directors may debate and decide behind closed doors, but outwardly should bury their personal views in the interest of the organisation.
As we’ve seen, throwing a hissy-fit when you don’t get your way damages reputations all around.
2. The ‘Free Speech’ defense: Abdel-Fattah and writers who boycotted the AWW framed the disinvitation of Abdel-Fattah as a breach of ‘free speech’. But free speech is not a ticket to intimidate or vilify.
The US Bill of Rights’ First Amendment encapsulates so many powerful ideas in so few words about what can, with care, make a strong democracy. It states that no law can infringe on free speech, a free press, the freedom to worship, to assemble (protest) or to petition the government.
In a crisis, I urge clients to assess Australia’s precious ‘freedom of speech’ in terms of whether what they might say strengthens or weakens our democracy.
Just because you can say something, should you?
3. Hypocrisy – here’s how it looks in my opinion. A small group were pushing a narrow, divisive agenda. They didn’t get their way, and reached for a higher principle – free speech. Only to be caught out.
In this case, in the wake of Abdel-Fattah’s disinvitation and Adler’s resignation, we learned that Adler and Abdel-Fattah had taken part in the disinvitation of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a Jew, from an earlier AWW.
The charge of hypocrisy is a poor result for people reaching for the high ground.
An option for AWW might have been simply balancing Abdel-Fattah’s appearance with a writer arguing an opposing perspective.
4. Good listening – good communicators do more listening than talking, and poorly-performing organisations often fail because leaders don’t understand this. The aftermath of the Bondi massacre was ‘tin-ear’ timing to go public with this spat.
5. Don’t start with hate – I have never seen a successful comms strategy that starts with recrimination or disrespect. Attack the message, not the messenger.
Vilifying a group of people falls flat in the broader community.
6. And the winner is? South Australian Premier, Peter Malinauskas, who sent a letter to the Adelaide Festival Board on 2 January 2026, before the Bondi massacre, asking for Abdel-Fattah to be disinvited https://bit.ly/4jRrx4g.
His delineation between ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘speech that is insulting, racist in any form, promotes religious discrimination or hate speech,’ could define what most Australians think of free speech.
Sometimes, clear communication and strong leadership look like the same thing.
