Share and Follow
A letter South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas sent to the Adelaide Festival board has shed new light on how he sought to have Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah dropped from Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Abdel-Fattah was included in the initial lineup for Adelaide Writers’ Week, which is run as part of the annual Adelaide Festival and falls under its governance.
The letter — stamped 2 January and directed to Adelaide Festival board chair Tracy Whiting — argued that Abdel-Fattah’s appearance was “not in the public interest” and would be “contrary to current community expectations of unity, healing and inclusion” in the wake of the Bondi terror attack.
He said continuing to host Abdel-Fattah was “likely to provoke division, disunity and hateful debate at a time when our nation desperately needs to strive for inclusion and tolerance”.
While freedom of speech was “fundamental to Australia’s democratic society … behaviour and speech that is insulting, racist in any form, promotes religious discrimination or hate speech is never acceptable”, he wrote in the letter published today by the Sunday Mail.
He said he believed Abdel-Fattah’s previous statements “go beyond reasonable public debate, being antisemitic and hateful at worst and deeply offensive and insulting at best”.
Abdel-Fattah has strongly denied claims that her past statements were antisemitic and has sent a defamation concerns notice to Malinauskas regarding his public characterisations of her views.
In a recent development, Abdel-Fattah has voiced concern over remarks made by the premier, suggesting she was labeled as a “terrorist sympathizer” and directly associated with the tragic events at Bondi.
“This was a vicious personal assault on me, a private citizen, by the highest public official in South Australia,” she said. “It was defamatory and it terrified me”.
A concerns notice is a mandatory step before defamation proceedings can begin. It requires the person alleged to have defamed another to be formally notified of the imputations complained of and provides a 28-day window in which they can make amends, including by apology, correction or retraction.
Malinauskas has so far not retracted his statements or apologised to Abdel-Fattah.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Malinauskas said: “Every step of this journey, all of my remarks and indeed actions, have been founded in a desire for compassion and people treating each other civilly, and people will be able to judge my remarks on themselves.”
Malinauskas told the ABC’s 7:30 program this week that he’d written the letter after being asked to put his concerns in writing after having several conversations about Abdel-Fattah with Whiting “around Christmas time”.
He said that the board had been actively considering whether to continue with Abdel-Fattah’s appearance since at least October, when board member Tony Berg resigned over former Adelaide Writers’ Week director Louise Adler’s programming decisions.
The organization had previously announced on January 8 that it was withdrawing Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to participate, citing reasons of “cultural sensitivity” in the wake of the Bondi incident.
Following the subsequent furore, which involved over 180 writers boycotting the event in protest, Whiting and nearly all of the board resigned, and Adelaide Writers’ Week was cancelled for 2026.
On 15 January, a newly composed board invited Abdel-Fattah to speak at the 2027 event and apologised “unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her”.
The premier defended the decision, describing it as “entirely reasonable,” and expressed surprise at the thought of the board not applying the same standard to this year’s event.
In the letter, verified as authentic by SBS News, Malinauskas also said that, while festival programming decisions were matters for the board, his government “fundamentally opposes the inclusion of Dr Randa Abdel Fattah on the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week program and reserves the right to make public statements to this effect”.
“I will also make it clear that I believe that the Board’s failure to remove Dr Abdel-Fattah from the program following the Bondi terror attack would be contrary to the Board’s broader responsibility to the Adelaide Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week,’ Malinauskas wrote.
He also raised the issue of the board’s “2024 decision to prevent the appearance of Mr Thomas Friedman at the Adelaide Writers’ Week following the receipt of a letter, co-signed by Dr Abdel-Fattah on 6 February 2025, expressing grave concern at his inclusion in last year’s program due to alleged racist statements”.
He added that this decision “was an entirely reasonable one” and said he would “find it astonishing if the Board were not willing to apply the same principle at this year’s event”.
While a letter from the board sent to those calling for Friedman to be dropped said he was not appearing due to “last-minute scheduling conflicts”, Friedman recently told Nine-Fairfax journalists that it wasn’t due to scheduling conflicts on his end.
Friedman said he was “told by email that the timing would not work out”.
Berg recently said that the board had “withdraw[n] the invitation to Friedman” after Adler “led a demand to the board” to have him dropped.
Adler has not commented on the Friedman decision, saying she “consider[s] discussions at the board table to be confidential”.
Peter Malinauskas’ office declined to provide SBS News with further comment about the letter.
