“Last week a royal commission, this week the Adelaide Festival Board eats crow, next month there may be a collective, powerful, irresistible call for responsible, responsive government in the ACT.” Columnist HUGH SELBY says our world has changed, “let there be hope at last”.
The Adelaide Festival Board members who got rid of that pesky, rabble-rousing Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah for her incessant public whining about the mass murder of Palestinians are now being invited to “eat crow”, publicly criticised by former Adelaide Festival honchos.
They are the recipients of an open letter signed by 11 former Festival leaders. Their intrays are loaded with bad news, as this open letter joins the withdrawal of dozens of other writers, all of whom lack the cultural sensitivity shown by the board in its bold move to silence one woman of no consequence in the interests of supporting what is claimed to be mainstream, proper opinion.
Apparently, this open letter includes the following call: “An about-face may be embarrassing but it is both the right thing to do and will cauterise the growing damage to this much loved and internationally significant South Australian cultural institution.”
By “eat crow” means acceding to the request to “about-face”. If principles for a cohesive, right-thinking, one-size-fits-all in today’s Australia are to be sacrificed for some short-term feigned tolerance of someone who wants to be starkly defiant, where will it end?
Tolerance is elastic and one of our strengths as today’s Australians has been to be ever-so-tolerant. We’re pretty free and easy about gun control, vaccinations, smoking and vaping, the high rates of indigenous imprisonment, letting people sleep on the streets and in shopping centres, the open dealing of drugs from a side window of suburban homes, waiting years for necessary dental treatment, and having mainstream classes in public education made unteachable by allowing damaged children to inflict the consequences day after day, week after week upon every other child and the teachers.
But there’s a limit and it took the good burghers of Adelaide to draw the line. They had the courage to grasp the importance of principle, to put the (unknown) views of the silent majority to the forefront, to recognise that the cost to the reputation (and the income) of the festival had to be paid in the short term, in the interests of a festival that from now on spoke with one voice and no troublesome dissent.
Should they be applauded or maligned?
Will it be secrecy or transparency?
Look at the price of capitulation to public pressure. The evidence is in front of us: Albo’s about-turn on a royal commission into the Bondi massacre. He had it nicely contained with an internal inquiry.
The results of that inquiry could be released or not released as the government saw fit. Remember how his cabinet sat on Lynelle Briggs’ report about “jobs for mates” for around two years, from 2023 to 2025?
Remember how angry our local leader-for-life became when his control of the Sofronoff Inquiry was derailed by Janet Albrechtsen’s premature expose of the findings in The Australian newspaper?
He must be much, much happier with the interminable inquiry into how Manteena didn’t get the contract for the multi-million dollar work on Campbell Public School.
Are you thinking, “What’s that about?” Fair enough. The job went to tender in October 2019. Manteena was the clear winner, but the job went to another contractor.
Now you remember? That’s a pity because the government doesn’t want you to remember anything about it. The story gets a bit sticky around Labor politicians, their staff, and senior bureaucrats. It’s best shrouded in the halls of forgetfulness.
Back to Albo’s team. Don’t forget the brilliance of artful smothering that has been shown in the refusal to own up to the impropriety of paying Brittany Higgins any compensation, the exclusion of then-senator Linda Reynolds from that process, the lack of any accountability in the Robodebt scandal, and hero Ben Roberts-Smith retaining his medals.
Some people would add AUKUS, as others would add our red trams debacle, but they are misguided and ignorant. Cross-generational debt is not a problem. It’s merely a crushing burden for our descendants born and yet to be born.
The point to be grasped is that a royal commission, especially one under a strong commissioner, will lead to bureaucrats and possibly politicians being bruised, maybe mauled in public. It won’t make careers, but it may end them.
There will be people in Canberra, powerful people, hoping that Commissioner Virginia Bell and her counsel assisting are less effective than Tony Fitzgerald in his 1980’s expose of rampant corruption in Queensland.
I have some advice for them. Get the records of the Wood Inquiry into NSW Police. Ms Bell was on the team. Read what she did in examination of corrupt police. My advice, freely given, is to roll over before you are rolled.
The spin teams will have to be on their toes, morning, noon and night, doing their best to spin it pro-Albo, pro-government.
Maybe they’ll succeed, maybe not.
It just shows how on the ball our Albo was with his first response.
Names and numbers matter
So what changed it? For accurate information we may have to wait 20 years for some information and 30 years for the rest. It could be shorter if a box of records falls off a truck, or someone hacks some electronic records.
What’s out there right now are the much publicised letters sent by people of influence.
The year kicked off with the Business Council of Australia and other peak bodies calling for a royal commission. Separately, some 130 business leaders, past and present, along with prominent Australians, did likewise.
Three days later some 60 Australian sports stars made the same call.
Of course, those massacre victims should still be with us; however, they did not die in vain. They changed our limping democracy for the better.
National Big Albo’s and local life leader A’s governments have been pretty much able to do as they please, especially as each has an opposition that is devoted to infighting, rather than calling government to account.
Sustained media criticism, letters to the editor, and such like have had no effect, just noise in an echo chamber.
But groupie letters from our peak bodies and national identities, wow. What a difference a week can make.
Last week a royal commission, this week the Adelaide Festival Board eats crow, next month there may be a collective, powerful, irresistible call for responsible, responsive government in the ACT.
Our world has changed: let there be hope at last.
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