The thesis of How We Became Post-Liberal

My 2024 book How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration is about an unfortunate outcome in Western political life. Why and how did we end up with intolerant ideologies on both sides of Western politics? This is particularly apparent in the Anglosphere, but all of the liberal democracies of Europe - France, Spain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, etc. - have been affected.

Right-wing people like to characterize themselves as protecting individual freedoms, especially freedom of speech, but of course that's not true historically or even now. They just identify different forms of speech and expression that they want to censor, and more generally have different restrictions on freedom that they want to impose. But the interesting story is how the political Left over the past 50 years turned away from liberalism as it was traditionally understood - as being primarily about liberty, with the logical corollary of also being about tolerating many ideas, practices, ways of life, etc., that we don't necessarily agree with or like.

Instead, the political Left and a large component of the knowledge class came to embrace an ideology entirely about defending, or even sanctifying, groups that are seen as oppressed. Other groups are then viewed primarily as privileged and oppressive, not matter how far this distorts the reality, and especially the reality faced by individuals who may have experienced personal hardships in their lives while belonging to a supposedly privileged demographic. This ideology can then override any and all other values, including individual liberty, freedom of speech, and the rule of law - but also any other values that people might hold, such as various aesthetic values. Thus, the result is a totalizing ideology that's fundamentally illiberal and more like a religion than like traditional liberal thought. As I trace historically in How We Became Post-Liberal, we can see hints of this starting to happen even in the late 1960s, but it becomes the main trend around 1975, with a further intensification more recently. This begins with an inflection point that we can narrow down to about 2010 (it then becomes more visible to the general public by, say, 2015). There's no single cause as to why this trajectory happened, but we can identify specific influences and perhaps some deep aspects of human nature that facilitated it. That's what How We Became Post-Liberal is about.

Part of the problem was a perceived failure of traditional liberalism to produce social change at the speed demanded by some identity groups - though whether positive change could have happened more quickly in the face of strong opposition is at least doubtful. I don't have any straightforward solution to this outcome. Ironically, I think it harms left-leaning political parties because they've become associated with an ideology that many everyday, non-political people fear and reject, though they might see some attraction in traditional liberal ideas that are now embraced by no major political party (at least in the Anglosphere). As a reaction, we see some people being attracted to right-wing populists who at least give lip service to traditional freedoms even if they show their own kinds of intolerance. The best we can do for the moment is continue to affirm traditional liberal ideas and put them out there in the sphere of public discussion as an alternative to the dominant illiberal ideologies of Left and Right. The other thing we can do is just show how this happened through a series of contingent historical events: it didn't have to be this way where we're stuck with a choice of rival illiberalisms. We can reject the illiberal ideologies of both sides and look for alternatives. Our own analyses of important issues and events needn't be grounded in either form of illiberal thought. Just knowing that fact can be liberating and potentially empowering, and getting as many people as possible to understand what has happened (and why) could help in our current situation. But I can't say it's a thought that I'm having a lot of success in spreading widely to the public.

How We Became Post-Liberal does provide a detailed analysis of ideas of liberalism and toleration, how they emerged as a powerful tradition in European modernity, and what we know about why they collapsed over the past half-century. Not many people seem to have a grasp of this problem, especially in the detail that How We Became Post-Liberal provides, so I'll continue to promote the book - not in the hope of raking in any large royalties but because I think it presents an important thesis that has not been developed with such rigor anywhere else.

From Invitation to Cancellation: Lessons from the Adelaide Writers’ Week Debacle

 

From Invitation to Cancellation: Lessons from the Adelaide Writers’ Week Debacle

by

Russell Blackford

 

On 8 January 2026, the Adelaide Festival Board announced the cancellation of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s scheduled appearance at Adelaide Writers’ Week – a literary festival that forms part of the broader Adelaide Festival scheduled to begin in late February. This prompted a confusing sequence of events with new developments announced on a daily basis and an accompanying flood of articles offering revelations or perspectives.

 

Abdel-Fattah identifies as Palestinian and takes a stance of radical opposition to the state of Israel and to people whom she considers Zionists. When the festival board announced its decision to deplatform her, it stated: “[G]iven 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.” The reference to Bondi was, of course, to the Bondi Beach terrorist attack on 14 December 2025, when a father-and-son team of jihadists opened fire on a Jewish community event and killed 15 of their targets as well as wounding many others. The board also noted that it was not suggesting that Abdel-Fattah “or her writing” had “any connection” with the Bondi Beach massacre.

 

Although concepts such as cultural sensitivity are vague, board members evidently thought that Abdel-Fattah’s presence at Writers’ Week would be distressing to some attendees at the festival. Viewed charitably, the board made an understandable decision – though not (as I’ll argue) the correct or best one. It responded to the fear and anguish experienced by many people in the Jewish community in Australia, especially after what had happened at Bondi Beach.

 

In reaction, a large number of the scheduled writers, including many prominent national and international figures such as Helen Garner and Zadie Smith, withdrew in protest. The online list of participants soon disappeared and accusations of censorship and racism proliferated.

 

The director of Writers’ Week ended up resigning, as did the entire Adelaide Festival Board (which has since been replaced). Writers’ Week itself was cancelled for 2026. My aim in this essay is not to follow every subsequent twist and turn, but to reflect on whether there are any lessons. Let’s start with Abdel-Fattah’s “past statements” that caused the Adelaide Festival Board so much angst.

#

 

Randa Abdel-Fattah does not merely argue that Israel should never have been established in the 1940s, that it has since committed international crimes, or that there’s a case for establishing a separate and functional Palestinian state. Instead, she has a constant record of calling for Israel’s destruction. This alone is enough to show that she has an extreme position on conflicts in the Middle East.

 

It’s been central to her rhetoric to accuse Israel of committing genocide or perpetrating a holocaust in Gaza. Such accusations inflame hatred against Israel, and while this need not, as a matter of logic, translate to hatred of the Jewish people, we can’t expect that everyone will make the required distinction. On the contrary, hostility toward Israel easily becomes hostility to Jews by association.

 

As I've argued elsewhere, there is a clear and overwhelming case that Israel has not committed genocide during its war against Hamas. Rather, it became involved in complex urban warfare against an unscrupulous enemy force embedded in civilian population centres. Nonetheless, the accusation of genocide has been made by many people, seemingly in good faith, and receives support from a variety of individuals and groups that claim to have expertise. By itself, therefore, it would not put Abdel-Fattah outside the mainstream of current debate in Australia, but it’s still a false and dangerous accusation. It tends to stir up hatred against the Jewish people – and in that sense it functions as a modern-day blood libel.

 

More disturbingly, Abdel-Fattah changed her Facebook profile picture on 8 October 2023 to adopt the stylised icon of a Palestinian paratrooper. This was only a day after the October 7 massacres carried out in Israel by Hamas and related groups, and the icon was widely used at the time to glorify terrorists who’d used powered paragliders to cross into Israel and launch attacks on civilian areas.

 

This is worth dwelling on for a moment. If we’re charitable toward Abdel-Fattah, we might accept her recent claim that she was initially unaware of the full extent of the atrocities. But it would have been no less repellent to display the paratrooper icon even if the October 7 massacres and associated horrors had been on a smaller scale – perhaps something more like the Bondi Beach massacre some two years later. Abdel-Fattah’s credibility is also undermined by her use of a social media account to mock victims of the atrocities close to the time when they were taking place.

 

Even if she was confused in October 2023, she had over two years to address the point before January 2026 when she was deplatformed from Writers’ Week. There was ample opportunity to express contrition and to distance herself from Hamas and any form of jihadist terrorism. Instead, she continued to use the paratrooper icon for at least a period of months and engaged in other troubling behaviour. Two incidents stand out in particular.

 

In early 2024, she was one of a number of individuals involved in leaking hundreds of pages of chats from a private WhatsApp group for Australian Jewish artists, writers, academics, and professionals, along with a spreadsheet containing names, occupations, social media links, and photos of numerous members of the group. This led to widespread harassment of Jews who’d been part of the group, including online abuse, boycotts, and death threats.

 

In April 2024, she took part in a “kid’s excursion” at a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Sydney. Video footage is available showing small children taking part in chants such as “5, 6, 7, 8, Israel is a terror state” and in calls for “intifada”.

 

A dismal litany of Abdel-Fattah’s statements and activities could continue, but this is enough to illustrate the point. She holds an extreme position and has acted like a fanatic. She’s willing to radicalise children in anti-Israel ideology. To put it mildly, she’s demonstrated remarkable insensitivity to the interests and feelings of Australian Jews during a time of constant news focus on antisemitic incidents and jihadist terror. But did this justify deplatforming her from Writers’ Week once she was invited and had accepted the invitation?

#

 

The mere fact that someone has extreme views on geopolitical issues or has engaged in radical forms of political activism does not automatically mean that they should be denied public platforms. It certainly doesn’t mean that they should be deplatformed once they’ve been given commitments. Speakers should be able to plan their lives on the basis that invitations – once accepted in good faith – can be relied on. Conversely, honoring their commitments is foundational for the reputations of literary festivals and their organisers.

 

Perhaps the worst aspect of deplatforming is that it’s often done in an attempt to stop the expression of locally unpopular, but perhaps arguable, viewpoints. When this happens, it’s against the spirit of free inquiry and discussion.

 

In short, literary festivals should stand by their invitations – once accepted – despite possible controversy, and they ought to bear in mind that every deplatforming tends to normalise a bad practice. The more often it occurs, the closer we get to a cultural environment of endless tit-for-tat deplatformings. To some extent, this is the world that we already live in, but it’s to their credit that Australian literary festivals have largely resisted it until now.

 

Does it follow that literary festivals should never rescind speaking invitations – once they’re accepted – under any circumstances? No, surely that would be going too far. We can consider some situations where deplatformings might be defensible.

 

What if, between the invitation/acceptance and the actual event, the speaker says or does something so outrageous as to bring the event into disrepute – perhaps publicly identifying as a Nazi supporter, or perhaps committing a crime of child sexual abuse? Alternatively, what if earlier misconduct by the speaker – something not previously known to the organisers – comes to light? There could be very serious cases, such as these examples, or less serious or even trivial ones. I’m not suggesting that speakers be deplatformed over minor transgressions or over unproven and contested accusations, but some cases might be clear-cut and truly egregious.

 

Alternatively, what if it becomes known that the speaker is a charlatan unqualified to speak on an assigned topic? Perhaps giving a prestigious platform to such a person would give him or her an undeserved aura of credibility in public debate. Again, in a serious enough case it might be justified to deplatform the speaker, although organisers should perform due diligence before issuing such an invitation. What if the organisers and speaker have agreed on a topic (perhaps one where the speaker has particular expertise) but later on the speaker makes it clear that he or she insists on speaking about something completely different? Perhaps the speaker doesn’t have the required expertise for the changed topic, or perhaps the original topic was chosen carefully to fit a certain vision of the overall program. In cases like these, organisers need some flexibility.

 

We can’t write down a closed list of all the circumstances that might possibly justify deplatforming, because nobody can think in advance of every unusual situation that might arise. Still, arguable cases would usually have something to do with a speaker’s questionable conduct (or revelations about it) after the exchange of an invitation and acceptance. The threshold for justification should be very high, and accepting an invitation to speak at an event should not mean that you must – until the event is over – avoid expressing opinions that might be unpopular with the organisers.

 

In Abdel-Fattah’s case, I don’t suggest that anything in her record rose to the level of a crime or actionable misconduct, and anyway, the gist of her past statements and actions must have been known to the organisers before they invited her to speak. On the other hand, the Bondi Beach massacre drastically changed the cultural environment after she’d accepted her invitation. Might that justify the decision to deplatform her?

 

The festival board did not make a crazy or arbitrary decision. Its purpose was not to purge anti-Israel speakers from Writers’ Week, since there were others on the program who were also radically critical of Israel. Moreover, the board was confronted with an extraordinary set of circumstances that combined the shocking, and very recent, murders at Bondi Beach with Abdel-Fattah’s record of zealotry. The board had every reason to review the situation and to do something in response to the Bondi Beach massacre. Nonetheless, deplatforming Abdel-Fattah was a misstep.

 

Apart from the usual sorts of issues, it was foreseeable that deplatforming her would be counterproductive: it would inevitably generate more controversy about her views and her approach to activism. This would bring more attention to her past statements and conduct, distract from other aspects of the festival, and generate more community distress than if she’d simply been allowed to speak.

 

But the festival organisers could have taken other actions in response to the blood that was shed at Bondi Beach. These would also have triggered objections – probably from Louise Adler, the Writers’ Week director, herself given her own well-publicised hostility to Israel. But they needn’t have involved anything that looked like censorship or gave up the high moral ground.

 

For example, Writers’ Week could have recognised the painful emotions being experienced within the Jewish community in Australia, and therefore reached out with late invitations to some Jewish writers. It would not have been difficult to find appropriate and credible individuals who’d have been able to offer thoughts on the situation faced by Australian Jews, along with more sympathetic perspectives on the need for a Jewish homeland than the usual demonisation that Israel cops from Australia’s cultural Left.

 

Instead, the board took the option of simply deplatforming Abdel-Fattah. For this, it deserved to feel some heat, whether at Writers’ Week itself or in broader public debate. It’s not so clear that it deserved a response that ultimately destroyed Writers’ Week 2026.

#

 

The organisers of the Adelaide Festival had some warning of what might happen. Only a few months before, in August 2025, the Bendigo Writers’ Festival imploded just days before its scheduled start. At the last minute, organisers of the festival sent speakers a code of conduct requiring them to avoid “language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. Speakers were also required to comply with an anti-racism plan developed by the festival’s sponsor, La Trobe University, which included a definition of antisemitism modeled on the controversial working definition promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

 

The reaction was immediate and vehement: over fifty writers and other participants withdraw from the festival in protest. They cited concerns over restrictions on free speech, but it’s clear that they were mostly concerned about being unable to present strongly anti-Israel perspectives. Abdel-Fattah was among the first speakers to withdraw, and she described the code of conduct as an attempt to silence Palestinian voices. Numerous sessions were cancelled, although the festival proceeded in a diminished format.

 

Organisers maintained that the code was intended to ensure “safe” conversations but it appeared to censor approaches and even topics. This was both restrictive and offensive, and it’s no wonder that there was a backlash. La Trobe University later issued a bland statement that, among other things, acknowledged the very late distribution of the hated code of conduct but seemed defensive about the university’s commitment to address safety and inclusion concerns. Unfortunately, this kind of safetyism has a potential to narrow the range of viewpoints. The code seems to have been targeted at aggressive criticism of Israel, but it would equally affect (for example) strongly worded critiques of Islam or other religions.

 

After seeing how this played out in Bendigo, the board of the Adelaide Festival should have known that deplatforming an outspoken anti-Israel activist would lead to trouble and perhaps even place Writers’ Week in jeopardy.

#

 

So many writers withdrew from Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026 that the entire event collapsed. Although I’ve placed blame on poor judgement by the Adelaide Festival Board, there might be plenty of blame to go around. What about the responses of these writers?

 

Some of them were wealthy and high-profile individuals who didn’t need money or exposure. Others might not have been wealthy but were people who receive numerous invitations to literary festivals and could easily risk withdrawing this once. But some might have made a real sacrifice for their cause as they understood it.

 

A relatively small number of the invited writers did not withdraw from the festival, and still wished to take part, even if they were unhappy about the decision to deplatform Abdel-Fattah. Some of these individuals were wealthy and did not need exposure, but it might have been personally meaningful to them to appear at Australia’s oldest and arguably most prestigious literary festival. Some who wanted to stay on the schedule might, indeed, have needed the exposure, but at least they were all promised a small honorarium for missing out. Some would-be attendees for the Writers’ Week audience might not only have been disappointed but even forced to cancel holiday plans. Some businesses and hospitality workers in Adelaide will probably lose custom or paid engagements.

 

In all, it’s impossible to calculate the net costs for everyone affected, but at any rate the collapse of such an event is itself a blow for Adelaide and more broadly for Australia’s literary culture.

 

Whatever the overall costs, some of the writers who withdrew probably behaved honorably. Perhaps they felt so strongly about deplatformings that they were unwilling to be associated with any event that had deplatformed a confirmed speaker. If they’d stayed on the program, they might have felt tainted. If all that’s true of them, they would have acted in the same way if the person who’d been deplatformed had been, for example, Tony Abbott, or a novelist (perhaps J.K. Rowling or Lionel Shriver) who is unpopular with Australia’s cultural Left. I’m not critical of whichever writers acted strictly on principle – but I wonder how many there were.

 

We’ll never know the true motivations of all these people, but here’s a thought experiment. Abbott was scheduled on the festival program for his new book from HarperCollins – what if he’d been deplatformed after a campaign to have him removed? Nobody can say for certain what the reaction would have been, but I’m confident that significantly fewer writers would have withdrawn in protest and that the festival would have survived even if it received justified criticism.

 

In the actual world, some of the writers who withdrew confined themselves to principled grounds when they made public statements, and in a small number of cases they even emphasised that they were not motivated by ideology. But others expressed personal support for Abdel-Fattah as if they agreed with her substantive views and approved of her pattern of conduct. Some unfairly accused the festival board of racism.

 

It might have been reasonable for writers or members of the public to announce their intention not to attend Writers’ Week in 2027 or thereafter without guarantees that nothing similar would happen again. But there’s an appearance that at least some, and perhaps many, of the writers were willing to destroy the 2026 iteration of Writers’ Week when it was at a late stage of preparation and irrespective of the impact on anyone else – not from high principle but out of ideological solidarity. It appears, too, that there was orchestration behind the scenes rather than a large number of individuals reacting independently.

 

This appearance of ideology and orchestration is strengthened by what happened at the 2025 Bendigo festival, where the anger was not from anyone being deplatformed. It’s further strengthened when we review Abdel-Fattah’s own record of intolerance.

#

 

In 2017, Abdel-Fattah was involved from an early stage in a public petition and associated campaign to block a speaking tour of Australia by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali is a prominent ex-Muslim activist and critic of Islamism, and indeed a critic of Islam itself, and for many years this has placed her in mortal danger from jihadists. Her tour was cancelled, and although this seems to have been based on security concerns, the petition and associated campaign must have contributed to the pressure on venues, insurers, and organisers.

 

It’s also known that Abdel-Fattah and nine other academics wrote in early February 2024 seeking that the Adelaide Festival’s invitation to the distinguished American journalist Thomas L. Friedman be cancelled. This request related to a short column in the New York Times in which Friedman had described ongoing conflicts in the Middle East in terms of animals’ survival mechanisms as shown in nature documentaries.

 

The board's response formally rejected the request to deplatform Friedman, emphasising (quite properly) that cancelling a scheduled writer was “an extremely serious request” and affirming a commitment to freedom of expression. However, it added that he was no longer participating “due to last-minute scheduling issues”.

 

Friedman has since stated that he was uninvited via an email citing timing problems, something that he accepted without seeking any further explanation. However, a former board member, Tony Berg, has publicly claimed that Louise Adler vigorously supported deplatforming Friedman during discussions prompted by the letter from Abdel-Fattah and others, so there is now some suspicion that the “timing” or “scheduling” issues were a pretext. This remains murky and is not something I can confirm. What is clear, however, is that Abdel-Fattah attempted to get Friedman deplatformed.

 

The offending column by Friedman was entitled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom” – it was a short, quirky, satirical observation by a veteran journalist who was obviously exasperated with all parties involved in conflicts in the Middle East, including the United States and Israel. Friedman made apt (and humorous) comparisons between the political actors in the region and the behaviours of certain kinds of animals.

 

Critics of the piece apparently objected to its comparison between entities such as Iran and Hezbollah (and one individual person in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu) and non-human animals, but some nuance is required here. Philosophers and others complain about dehumanisation when confronted by a style of language that, as the American academic David Livingstone Smith has expressed the point, is often “a prelude and accompaniment to extreme violence”. In such cases, the people in a dehumanised group are presented as not really human at all but as demons, dangerous predators to be hunted down, or vermin to be exterminated.

 

But this language is totally different in its context, tone, register, and persistence from Friedman’s allegory, and skilled readers should recognise the distinction. When the Nazis portrayed Jews as rats in human form, or when the génocidaires in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches and snakes, these were not isolated metaphors employed for a satirical allegory. They were systematic, relentless, state-supported campaigns of hatred intended to prime national populations for mass killing.

 

At one point, Friedman compared Iran to a wasp spreading its young in the form of terrorist organisations inserted into other countries in the region, and he observed that the United States – personified as a tired old lion – did not know how to kill the wasp without burning down the whole jungle. This could, I suppose, be interpreted by somebody sufficiently obtuse as a suggestion for nuking Iran. In context, it was a mocking comment about the clumsiness of American foreign policy and the destruction that it frequently causes.

 

Abdel-Fattah was also one of many writers, academics, and others who took part in a campaign to remove Jewish singer and songwriter Deborah Conway from the Perth Festival’s 2024 Writers’ Weekend program because of her support for Israel. This campaign singled out a statement made by Conway during a radio interview in which she alluded to Hamas’s recruitment of very young armed fighters – such as adolescents aged 16 or 17 – and misrepresented her as an advocate for slaughtering Palestinian children. Despite this, Conway was ultimately included in the Perth program, but she has faced a broader backlash in arts and literary circles, leading to other campaigns – some of them more successful – for her to be deplatformed from public appearances.

 

In short, some writers who withdrew from Writers’ Week emphasised commitment to freedom of speech and to debate across political divides, but it’s evident that Abdel-Fattah herself is not motivated by these values. For her, and undoubtedly for many others with similar views, literary festivals are now legitimate sites for anti-Israel activism. This includes, where possible, suppressing voices that support Israel or criticise Islam while rejecting any restraints for themselves.

#

 

Literary festivals are meant to be joyous occasions where people who love books might be able to see some of their favourite authors in person, perhaps get a book signed, catch up with news from the literary world, and of course hobnob with each other. They’re an opportunity to make, renew, or deepen friendships. The speakers often present fascinating insights into their process and craft – and would-be writers (or less established writers) in the audience can often learn a great deal.

 

Some writers do, of course, address political, philosophical, or moral issues in their work, and it can also be worthwhile to hear their perspectives. But writers’ political views should be only one facet of a literary festival and not the most important one. There’s room for conversation or even debate between participants with different viewpoints, and this could help audiences to ponder the pros and cons of issues for themselves– and it might even improve understanding between the speakers when they’re faced with intelligent people who disagree with them. Ideally then, literary festivals should include sincere, potentially useful conversations across political and other divides.

 

But in practice, this almost never happens. Thus, in a recent article in Eureka Street, Erica Cervini asks whether literary festivals can still host real debate, raising the point that some writers seem to go from one festival to another and that the usual suspects tend not only to have political views that they want to push but similar political views. Some of the larger festivals, including Writers’ Week, might as well be called political conferences because their guest lists are so dominated by politicians, journalists, and activists, most of whom offer variations on the same message. To be fair, however, Writers’ Week 2026 would not have been a total echo chamber, since it had scheduled some conservative speakers including Tony Abbott.

 

It’s complicated, but there are lessons from the Adelaide debacle. To reclaim literary festivals as celebrations of books, ideas, and literary craft – rather than platforms for political mobilisation and sites for conflict and scandal – organisers could begin by giving literature the first priority. This means a higher proportion of sessions devoted to authors discussing their writing processes, influences, and techniques, the state of publishing, or the pleasures and challenges of reading in an era of competing media.

 

Panels on literary and genre fiction, poetry, theatre, literary memoir, or translation could dominate the schedule, with political and ideological themes treated as part of the mix rather than the centre of attention. When politics does enter the conversation – as it inevitably will with many serious writers in all genres – festivals could design formats that encourage genuine exchange of views.

 

Festivals could reward speakers who are intellectually rigorous and temperamentally equipped for disagreement, rather than those who thrive on affirmation from like-minded colleagues and audiences. Organisers could seek out a broader range of literary figures – whether novelists, poets, critics, historians, or public intellectuals and essayists – who bring distinctive viewpoints and styles. Where politicians and journalists do appear, it should not be for name recognition, or even for topical relevance, but for their ability to model thoughtful disagreement, bridge literature and public ideas, and avoid descending into dogmatism, zealotry, and polemics. This still permits forthright debate, even on hot-button issues such as the war in Gaza, but in an atmosphere of basic respect and civility.

 

All of this requires festival organisers to commit to their events’ foundational purpose: joy in books and the life of the mind. To some extent, no doubt, this happens already – the picture is not completely bleak. At their best, Australia’s literary festivals are still welcoming spaces where readers of all stripes feel invited to engage deeply with literature, and when the moment calls for it, with each other’s differing views on the world that it illuminates.

 

But the recent drama in Adelaide is a wake-up call. It’s a reminder of what can happen when balance is lost and political zeal crowds out what makes literary festivals so attractive in the first place: their capacity to bring people together through a shared love of books and writing.

##

25 January 2026

Russell Blackford is Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle. His latest book is How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury 2024).

An important distinction in the debate over hate speech, jihadism, and s.18C of the Racial Discrimination Act

The following is a tweet that I made today on the platform formerly known as Twitter. I'm republishing it here (in slightly edited form) where it might get some more views. I think it makes an important point...

One thing that I have to talk about from yesterday is the issue of hate speech that's come up for debate in Australia. The government recently made an excuse that it has been inactive in moving on hate speech by Muslim clerics, etc., because until now the political argument was about cutting back existing hate speech and similar laws rather than extending them. There was even an implication, I think, that people criticizing the government were being hypocrites.

There's some truth to the claim that many of us have wanted to cut back on laws restricting speech. In particular, many of us have wanted to repeal s.18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, or at least to replace it with a narrowly framed provision based on vilification rather than on giving offence. But let's think about this. First, many of today's debates have some connection with race, nationality, etc., and especially with the role of various religions in society and the world (and religion can in some cases be connected back to race or else be said to be "racialized"). The bottom line is that a court that's sufficiently determined to read a provision like s.18C expansively has enormous scope to do so: these days, a vast range of political speech has at least some connection with categories such as race. Even if some of us consider the connection to be tenuous on a particular occasion, the Federal Court might well not. Second, it's the nature of political debate in the public sphere that it stirs up passions or even anger. It would be nice if we could all keep cool heads and address each other with maximum civility even when we disagree strongly, but that's not a realistic expectation. The upshot is that there will be a lot of political language that's intemperate. Put this together with the first point, and there's enormous scope for all sorts of intemperate language to have at least some connection with categories such as race. You can see where this is leading. You might think that the Federal Court would be aware of the problem and would react by taking a very narrow view of what is offensive in the legal sense. In that case, it might filter out the merely angry or intemperate comments that everyone has to put up with during the cut and thrust of political debate. Indeed, in theory the court does apply a high threshold for offence in the legal sense. But in practice there is little record (if any) of cases being decided on the basis that the language used was intemperate but not legally offensive. Perhaps some of my friends who are lawyers or legal scholars can identify a few such cases, but none immediately come to my mind. So, we have enormous scope for the Federal Court to find breaches of s.18C merely because someone said something intemperate that might have caused somebody else to take offence - and the topic had at least some tenuous connection with race, nationality, and related categories. To take this point a step further, even language that is not intemperate can often offend. If I point out (using civil, temperate language) that historically Islam has been a religion of war and conquest, not a religion of peace, that might well offend a lot of Muslims. In the famous Giniewski case in France, all Paul Giniewski did was point out that Christianity had an inherent tendency toward antisemitism with its doctrine of the supersession of the old dispensation (God's covenant with Israel) by the new (Christ's sacrificial atonement) ... and so it laid a foundation for Jew hatred that led to the Holocaust. He was completely correct, but he was dragged through the French courts and lost his case all the way to the highest court in the country. Giniewski finally won in the European Court of Human Rights. This was a rare case where the Strasbourg Court actually did something useful (it has made bad decisions where it has granted member states of the Council of Europe a "margin of appreciation" and hence allowed them to get away with all sorts of authoritarian actions). Meanwhile, Giniewski was put through this process over legitimate remarks that offended Catholic interest groups. In conclusion at this point, a provision like s.18C, placed in the hands of a court that's inclined to read it expansively, has enormous scope for punishing legitimate political and other speech. Third, section 18C is supposedly tempered by s.18D, which allows a defence. But s.18D is fairly much a dead letter, or at least it's useless if the Federal Court is out of sympathy with whoever is being sued. It has been interpreted in such a way that it's open to endless manipulation by the court to achieve what the court considers a socially fair outcome. If a judge takes the subjective view that your speech was not in the public interest, was not reasonable, was too one-sided, etc., your defence will fail, as is usually the case whenever s.18D is relied on. There's essentially unlimited scope for judges to test the legitimacy of your speech against their own political views. No statute restricting speech should be open to being used in that way. The bottom line is that s.18C is a terrible law that should not exist in its current form. The fundamental point about why it's so terrible is that it (in effect) prohibits speech that might offend somebody and which a Federal Court judge might not regard sympathetically. That should not be the relevant test. There's a world of difference between my saying something that offends you and my telling a third person that they should murder you. Note that I don't need to tell the third person to murder you in so many words - there are many ways to make my meaning clear. If I go around saying that the members of some group are snakes and cockroaches, I don't need to add the words "and they therefore should be exterminated like vermin" - the implication is clear enough. So, at this point we have two kinds of speech - speech that offends somebody and speech that calls for others to murder (or otherwise seriously harm) somebody. It's only the latter that should be considered "hate speech". Unfortunately, however, the term "hate speech" is used so widely and so loosely in our society that it has come to mean all sorts of speech, including speech that merely sets back (if people take any note of it) the political agenda of some group. Thus, the term "hate speech" is thrown around very freely in order to stigmatize - and attempt to suppress - speech that might be entirely legitimate (even if not optimal in its tone) in a liberal democratic society. All of this is consistent with the possibility that, even as legitimate speech is being chilled, much genuinely hateful speech that calls for violence against a group such as the Jews might be spewed in settings where it will be taken to heart and possibly acted upon. While some of us walk on eggshells in what we say about important issues (just in case we might offend somebody), there can be other individuals in the same society who are getting away with truly dangerous speech that potentially inflames murderous violence. I need to look further into the new hate speech laws, and I don't currently have a view as to whether I should support them. Perhaps I shouldn't. But it's quite consistent to support laws that criminalize incitement to violence and even murder while also opposing endlessly manipulable laws that can get us into trouble with the courts merely for saying something that might cause offence. Pretending there is no distinction to be made here is dishonest.

My contribution to a new piece at The Conversation

Over at The Conversation, five people (including me) respond to the question of whether democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others. Check out the whole thing.

My own response discusses the big advantage of democracy: that you can throw out an unpopular government peacefully. But I also emphasize the inherent fragility of democracy:

The government of the day is expected to take a psychologically unnatural attitude to its opponents.

It has to maintain, firstly, that it is objectively better at governing than its opponents, whom it is justified in criticising without mercy. But then it must accept that, if it should lose an election, it will graciously hand over control of the treasury, the military, and all the agencies and powers of the state to those same opponents.

I suspect that the conditions in which this attitude seems rational and commendable are very rare, and that they are all too easy to erode. We ought to give them more thought if we really care about preserving democracy. 

Article in The Philosophers' Magazine: An Air of Unreality

Back in October, I published this article in The Philosophers' Magazine. It begins as follows:

On 7 October 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas and allied groups attacked multiple Israeli communities, including a music festival held near the kibbutz Re’im in the north-western Negev desert. The terrorists murdered almost 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250 people to serve as hostages. There have been credible reports of torture, rape, and other forms of cruelty inflicted during these events, which I’ll refer to as the October 7 massacres.

These attacks on Israel attracted widespread international condemnation. More surprisingly, however, many people excused them or even glorified the perpetrators. The excuses and glorification came not only from Islamists in the Middle East but from secular opponents of Israel living in Western democracies. It became clear that many politically focused individuals in the West are not merely critical of the Jewish state and certain of its actions and policies; they regard Israel as a white colonial enclave that lacks any legitimacy, should not have been established in the 1940s, and ought to be destroyed.

Over the last two years, such criticisms have been amplified many times over, as we’ve followed events in a desperate urban war carried out on terms dictated by Hamas. Like many such organizations, Hamas benefits by maximizing the number of deaths and injuries within its own civilian population. These can be leveraged for a global information war, and indeed Hamas has achieved remarkable successes at that level of its struggle against Israel. This is a well-known approach to asymmetrical warfare. It has often been used in the past to gain international support and to triumph politically against militarily stronger enemies.

You'll want to read the entire article if you're troubled by current events in Australia and elsewhere involving antisemitism and jihadism. I don't attempt to excuse Israel of all wrongdoing, but I argue forthrightly - and I'll repeat here - that Israel is not committing genocide and that the genocide narrative is propaganda from a terrorist organization seeking Israel's destruction. It is all too easily believed by many Westerners who come to the debate already in the grip of an anti-Israel and anti-Western ideology. I conclude:

The false Gazan genocide narrative sidelines the challenges of fighting a terrorist organization embedded within a civilian population. It inflames global tensions, fosters antisemitism, and distracts from efforts to understand the genuine rights and wrongs of the war.

There is no such thing as Islamophobia ...

I'm reposting the following comment that I made earlier today on my Twitter (now X) account...

Your occasional reminder that there is no such thing as Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational and pathological fear, but a certain level of fear of Islam is perfectly rational. Islam has always been a religion of war and conquest, and it has always sought to establish its own political order - subordinating everyone to its authority. This has been the case ever since the seventh century. It is fundamental to the religion.

And before someone starts telling me about how bad Christianity is, let me assure you that I am well aware that the logic of Christianity historically caused it to be a more persecutorial religion than Islam ever was. It's perfectly rational to feel a certain fear of Christianity as well. All religions have their faults, and it is never irrational to be afraid of them to some appropriately calibrated extent. Christianity is certainly not an exception. In some ways it has been the worst religion of them all. But to some extent it was tamed by reaction against the catastrophic wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then by the 18-century Enlightenment. I have a lot to say about the record of Christianity and Islam, among other religions, in my most recent book, How We Became Post-Liberal. The bottom line is that we should not be persecuting people for their religious beliefs and practices. We should practice religious toleration, and in that sense, people should have religious freedom. No one should have to fear persecutions, pogroms, inquisitions, witch hunts, etc. But it is absolutely fine, and indeed necessary, to study religions and the dangers that they bring to our secular liberal societies - and to be wary of them to the different levels that are appropriate to our historical circumstances. It's also worth noting that this appropriate wariness of various religions has nothing to do with racism. It is not a suggestion that people are somehow an inferior biological sub-species because they adhere to certain religious beliefs and practices. It's a rational recognition that religions motivate people and that the motivation is not always good even though we like to sentimentalize religions and pretend that they are always forces for kindness and toleration.

As a final point, it's difficult to talk about these topics openly and honestly in Australia without the risk of being accused of "hate speech", with the possibility of being dragged into court proceedings that will destroy our life savings (or worse). But we need to be able to talk about these things - so one of the first actions that I recommend we take in Australia is to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. We need to be allowed to talk! We can still have laws against genuine hate speech, narrowly understood, such as preaching that Jews should be murdered. If we need to strengthen some laws to crack down on that kind of speech, so be it, though we need to be very careful. We have to tread cautiously and consider the downside and possible abuses whenever we restrict speech.

But in any event, we currently have a law that requires that we can't say anything that even offends people if it can be connected, however tenuously or imaginatively, with race, ethnicity, etc. Although the concept of offence is supposed to be narrow, that is not how it is being treated in practice. The courts have failed us by interpreting s.18C expansively and interpreting its defences in s.18D so narrowly that s.18D is almost a dead letter. The existence of such a provision, together with the failure of the Federal Court to interpret it in a way that protects free speech, chills important conversations on urgent social issues. Repeal of section 18C should be a political priority.

New by me at The Conversation: "‘Liberal’ has become a term of derision in US politics – the historical reasons are complicated"

Check out this new piece by me at The Conversation, where I review Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals) by Kevin M. Schultz. As a sample:

As Schultz tells the story, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, some figures on America’s left were losing patience with what they saw as a stultifying, bureaucratic, politically timid liberal establishment.

Schultz pinpoints 1964 as a key year when American liberalism began to lose its prestige. As he describes in detail, there was a marked change in political tone between 1963 and 1964, when Black radicals started to criticise white liberal allies, whom they had come to regard as spineless and hypocritical. From this point, white liberal crystallised as a term of abuse on the political Left.

Schultz appears sympathetic to the Black civil rights leaders of the time, whose impatience with the pace of change was understandable. But he also reminds us of the considerable effort, self-sacrifice and achievements of white liberals during the 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in dramatic initiatives such as the landmark Civil Rights Act.

Part of the problem was a mismatch, not only of priorities, but perceptions of what was realistically achievable. As radical left-wing movements emerged during the 1960s, their leaders distanced themselves from liberals and liberalism.

American liberals endured much worse from the conservative side of politics. During the “long” 1960s – the decade and a half from the late 1950s to the early 1970s – there was a right-wing backlash. Key conservative figures, such as William F. Buckley, ceded the term liberal to their opponents, which Herbert Hoover had refused to do in the 1930s. Then they attacked it and everything that it stood for within their understanding.

Political conservatives associated liberals with radical politics, atheism, communism, and what Schultz refers to as “cultural effeteness”. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew weaponised this narrative in the the 1972 presidential election and inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Democratic Party’s candidate, George McGovern.

Schultz sees the term liberal as having been abandoned during the 1970s, in the sense that almost nobody in politics or public debate wanted to identify with it. Instead, it was used to label others.

I conclude by finding the book useful but also limited and frustratingly shallow in its analysis. Go and check the whole thing to see the argument.