The new Adelaide Festival board has issued a public apology to Palestinian-Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and has promised she will be invited to Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2027.
Abdel-Fattah immediately accepted the apology, posting on Instagram that it was a vindication “of our collective solidarity and mobilisation against anti-Palestinian racism, bullying and censorship”.
She said she was still considering the board’s invitation to appear at the 2027 event.
In a statement on Thursday morning, Adelaide Festival Corporation acknowledged they had previously said they would exclude Abdel-Fattah from this year’s event “because it would be culturally insensitive to allow her to participate. We retract that statement.”
“We apologise to Dr Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her. Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right. Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short.”
The apology comes after Tony Berg, a former board member and the former managing director of Macquarie Bank, issued a statement to the media accusing the former Adelaide Writers’ Week director Louise Adler and Abdel-Fattah of a “selective” and “utterly hypocritical” devotion to free speech.
Adler resigned on Tuesday over Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation, and later that day, the Adelaide Festival Corporation announced the cancellation of the 2026 writers’ festival.
But in the statement circulated by Berg this week, the Sydney businessman said he was “utterly astonished” at Adler’s claim she had resigned in the name of free speech, and at Abdel-Fattah’s “outrage at being ‘cancelled”.
“They both exhibit hypocrisy in defending free speech for some, when I observed them both to stridently oppose free speech during my time on the board,” he said, referring to the 2024 incident when controversial New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was scheduled to appear but did not do so.
Ten academics, including Abdel-Fattah, had written to the festival board on 6 February 2024, requesting it rescind the invitation to Friedman, who had published a controversial column days earlier, which compared the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom.
The festival board responded three days later in writing, telling the lobbying academics that requesting the board to cancel an artist or writer was “extremely serious”.
“We have an international reputation for supporting artistic freedom of expression,” the letter said, signed by the board’s chair, Tracey Whiting.
“Thomas L Friedman was programmed to contribute online from New York. However, I have been advised that due to last-minute scheduling issues, he is no longer participating in this year’s program.”
Berg said “Adler led a demand to the board to retract an invitation to Tom Friedman to participate in the 2024 Adelaide Writers Week.”
“After Tom Friedman was invited to speak, Randa Abdel-Fattah had led a group of academics demanding that Tom Friedman be deplatformed. Then Louise Adler, Ruth MacKenzie and Kath Mainland put an ultimatum to the Board that they would resign if it did not endorse their recommendation to disinvite Friedman. In the face of that threat, the board felt it had no alternative but to allow withdraw [sic] the invitation to Friedman.”
Berg said he understood why a number of authors [more than 170] had turned down invitations to come to AWW 2026 on freedom of speech grounds.
“But they should understand that the people with whom they are standing, in fact, have actively undermined freedom of speech in the past,” he said.
“Unlike Adler and Abdel-Fattah, I support free speech, not on a selective basis but with a range of views presented in respectful dialogue.”
Adler responded to Berg’s allegations by accusing the former board member of breaching board confidentiality.
“I consider discussions of the board table to be confidential,” she said in a prepared statement.
“I’m rather surprised that a former CEO of Macquarie Bank has breached those confidences. It’s indicative of the way the former board operated, and I believe will make for a rich case study for future management students.”
Abdel-Fattah disputed Berg’s claims that she, along with Adler, led the charge to cancel Friedman.
“I was one of 10 Indigenous and academics of colour who wrote a researched letter with references and footnotes about the harm of racial tropes,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.
“What is missing in this is the question of power. We write letters on Google Docs to boards. The people who want to cancel us have premiers intervening.”
Adelaide festival has been approached for comment.
Abdel-Fattah announced on Wednesday she would be pursuing defamation action against South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas over comments he made earlier this week.
Abdel-Fattah said she would continue her defamation proceedings against Malinauskas on Thursday.
Since last Thursday, the South Australian premier has consistently denied any direct interference, insisting that the board acted independently.
“However, when asked for my opinion I was happy to make it clear that the state government did not support the inclusion of Dr Abdel-Fattah on the Adelaide writers’ week program,” he said.
Greens arts spokesperson Senator Hanson Young said the premier also had to apologise.
“Peter Malinauskas must also now apologise to Randa Abdel-Fattah, Louise Adler and the people of South Australia,” she said in a statement.
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