Could the 2023 Adelaide Writers Week be the leftist stack to end all leftist literary festival stacks in Australia? For the moment at least?
Literary festivals in Australia are funded primarily by taxpayers via various federal, state and local government grants. There is usually some funding from business but the events would not be what they are without the support of governments – Labor and Coalition alike – dishing out taxpayers’ money.
They have developed into occasions where members of the intelligentsia, broadly defined, get hold of bucket loads of other people’s money and invite their leftist comrades to address the like-minded. Particularly in the area of nonfiction, they channel the ABC as conservative-free zones where essentially everyone agrees with essentially everyone else on essentially everything in a left-of-centre way.
I have been critiquing literary festivals in this column and my Media Watch Dog blog, among other places, for more than a decade. However, I have never seen a stack like this year’s AWW, which is directed by publisher Louise Adler. In my blog on February 10, I drew attention to the line-up of talent in the 2023 AWW’s Australian nonfiction area. It consists of almost wall-to-wall leftist and left-of-centre types. Not everyone fits into this category. But I wrote that there was not one conservative on the list.
It has since been drawn to my attention that Amanda Vanstone, who served as a cabinet minister in John Howard’s Coalition government, is on the program. On investigation, it turns out that Vanstone – who, by the way, would not call herself a political conservative – is chairing a session called “Food for thought or thought for food?”. Needless to say, it’s all about cuisine.
Read the article by Gerard Henderson in The Australian.