While the current wave of institutional silencing has its cause in a Netanyahu-led McCarthyist campaign against any criticism of Israel, we’d be remiss to think it’s just a phase. Have we all forgotten the ABC’s attempts to control its journalists’ use of personal social media, way before October 7, because they were upsetting the frail petals in the Coalition government?
There’s a straight line from that debacle to Australia’s latest atrocity against creative freedom: the Bendigo Writers Festival attempting to impose a “code of conduct” regarding an antisemitism definition on speakers. As self-owns go, it’s right up there with all-time greats: Creative Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. It’s a long list now.
The evil here (apart from the obvious) is this thing called a “code of conduct”: a quasi-legal invention that’s been proliferating across the institutional landscape for years and has reached plague proportions. Writers’ festivals did not use to have codes of conduct, and for a good reason — they don’t need one.
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You may recall that in Antoinette Lattouf’s unlawful termination case against the ABC, the national broadcaster thought it had nailed her for breaching its code of conduct. It turned out she hadn’t breached it. The point there, however, wasn’t that she’d slipped through a loophole, but that she’d done nothing wrong in the first place. If the ABC’s code had in fact caught her, it would have been the code that was out of order.
Concert pianist Jayson Gillham is currently suing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for cancelling his show after he declared during a recital a statement regarding Israel’s targeted killings of journalists in Gaza (180 at last count). He was introducing a piece, Connor D’Netto’s “Witness”, the composer of which had dedicated it to those journalists. Part of the MSO’s defence is that Gillham was bound by its code of conduct, which enabled it to control what he could say — and it hadn’t wanted him to say that.
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Earlier this year, Creative Australia cancelled pro-Palestine artist Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice Biennale contract under its code of conduct, before later reinstating him after sustained public backlash, with both decisions remaining inadequately explained. Likewise, in December 2023, Sydney Theatre Company invoked its policy of not scaring its subscribers when it silenced two of its own actors for daring to wear a keffiyeh during a curtain call performance. You might think that’s now a quaint historical artefact, but only a week ago, a Sydney restaurant, Jimmy’s Felafel, refused diners entry for the same crime.
These days, all universities, like most large employers and every government body, have not just one but dozens of codes of conduct. These regulate everything from social media use to how employees should speak to each other in the cafeteria. Having a policy against bullying and harassment is de rigueur and unobjectionable, but once one extends into basic freedoms like speech, assembly and association — let alone academic freedom — the problems get very real.
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As a lawyer representing dozens of individual targets of the pro-Israel lobby over the past two years, I’ve repeatedly encountered a similar pattern of behaviour. Once a target has been identified by pro-Israel lobbyists and the demands or threats start flying into the inboxes of their employers, sponsors and customers, the game begins.
Universities have become particularly adept at this game. But instead of considering whether a staff member has failed to perform their duties, they turn instinctively to their codes of conduct and the weasel words of respectful engagement, psychosocial safety, politeness and the kicker — conduct inconsistent with the standing of the institution. Pretty much anything can fail the test if viewed from the right angle.
Apart from the inherent and toxic silencing that flows from such a reductive and dumb approach to regulating human conduct, the universities and other prominent institutions ignore their responsibility to their staff: to protect them from disingenuous and calculated attacks. The ABC has become legendary in its willingness to throw its people under the nearest passing bus as soon as Rupert or a lobbyist chucks a wobbly, but it is far from alone. Treating every serial complaint as if it has no context is just doing the work of its authors for them.
The pre-emptive move of the Bendigo Writers Festival is the next logical step in this progression of cowardice.
Instead of waiting for Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah or another writer to say something on its stage that will adorn page one of The Australian the next day, it elected to self-censor its entire show by demanding writers to promise not to trip over the UA definition of antisemitism and to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive or disrespectful”. Gallingly, the festival leaned on La Trobe University’s policies as its excuse.
Lest this be forgotten, it’s a writers’ festival. Remember when the major sponsors of the Adelaide Festival pulled out because director Louise Adler was platforming a couple of Palestinian writers? (That happened, by the way, eight months before October 7.) Bendigo sure didn’t want to run that risk.
It isn’t clear yet whether the Bendigo Writers Festival was triggered by a letter to La Trobe from the so-called Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A), a pro-Israel group whose mission is to cancel its enemies. The letter, revealed today by Deepcut News, demanded that Abdel-Fattah not be allowed to speak, labelling her “an extremist anti-Israel and antisemitic activist “ and “known racist”. 5A’s commitment to academic rigour and intellectual freedom there is apparently subsidiary to its war aims.
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Of course, pre-empting bullies only encourages them — ask any of the US universities who’ve caved in to Donald Trump.
For any institution whose reason for existing is to champion the diversity of human thought and expression — the ultimate public good — to give up before it’s even challenged, just because it can’t handle the heat, is pathetic and an absolute self-cancellation of its own social licence to exist.
Bendigo Writers Festival has lost anyway, since more than one-third of its writers have pulled out in protest. It may never recover, and really that’s what it deserves.
The US First Amendment, the Supreme Court famously said, “presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection”. We don’t have the same law, but our democracy depends on the identical principle.
Disclaimer: Jayson Gillham, Randa Abdel-Fattah and Khaled Sabsabi are clients of the writer, and the writer’s firm is representing Gillham in his case against the MSO.