Published: 13 January 2026
Last updated: 15 January 2026
Espousing your morals and ideas and living your life in alignment with them are two very different concepts.
Everyone wants to believe they are living a life of good decisions and moral fortitude, but in reality, there are lots of temptations that get in the way; sweet schadenfreude, the deliciousness of revenge, the hunger of greed, the power of ego, the pull of power or ambition and the list goes on.
Ultimately, it can be hard work to be the best person you can be, and I think in some respects, it should be.
Some of the most central tenets of social justice include centring lived experience, not talking over people who have skin in the game, recognising and listening when other people try to explain their identity and applying the same standards and humanity to all people, rather than engaging in selective judgement of who is deserving.
The left has been guilty of widespread hypocrisy over these values since October 7. I’ve watched the “rules of engagement” broken repeatedly by people I had previously called friends and colleagues and lost respect for so many people I previously admired.
Nowhere has this hypocrisy been more evident than in the work and writing of Randa Abdel-Fattah.
It therefore gives me not one iota of pleasure to write that pulling Randa Abdel-Fattah from the program of the Adelaide Writers' Week – and the way in which it was done – was a mistake.
She calls for the recognition of the humanity of her own people, while simultaneously dehumanising others
Comments15
Alan17 January at 01:08 am
Adelaide Writers Week is almost entirely a tax-payer funded event. The view that a tax-payer funded event must support views that traumatize or vilify specific groups is simply wrong. Good governance requires that public funds are not used to marginalize the very taxpayers who provided the money. Expressed another way, freedom of speech prevents the government from jailing a writer for their views. It does not mandate that the government must pay for their hotel, flight, and stage.
Furthermore, writers, of all people, must realize that “speech” is not simply a harmless exchange of words, but a powerful tool that can cause tangible harm. The government and the AWW board have a “duty of care” to ensure that the festival doesn’t become a platform for vilification. If a festival is funded by the public, it must serve the entire public.
Habeeb Marouf15 January at 03:11 pm
‘Randa repeatedly describes Australia as “a settler colony on stolen land”’ – where is the distortion in that? —– that Australia is a settler colony on stolen land is historical fact and also the core of gthe statement at the foot of this web page: “The Jewish Independent acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia”. It’s illuminating that you are able to maintain this schismatic thinking, as it explains the failure to see the direct parallel between Aboriginal experience of settler colonial erasure and replacement with that of the Palestinians at the hands of European Zionists.
Pat15 January at 09:22 am
If I could write like this, this is exactly what I would have written. The tragedy of our time is the death of debate. We cancel people we don’t agree with instead of challenging them in open fora. The Adelaide Festival is not a mass rally, it is a contained space. Abhorrent as her views are she should have been allowed to express them and made to defend them by people using facts and reason instead of hysteria and hatred.