Yet another example of cultural leadership failure has emerged from the Bendigo Writers Festival, where at least 48 participants withdrew prior to last weekend’s event after being asked to sign a last-minute code of conduct linked to La Trobe University’s sponsorship.
This mass exodus represents more than a scheduling disruption; it signals the latest manifestation of a profound crisis engulfing Australian cultural institutions, where risk-averse managerialism systematically destroys the very democratic purpose these organisations claim to serve.
Bendigo Writers Festival: quick links
We’ve already witnessed this toxic dynamic in Creative Australia’s catastrophic handling of the Khaled Sabsabi affair at the Venice Biennale, where risk management processes became instruments of censorship rather than protection. The independent review revealed how Creative Australia fundamentally misunderstood risk itself, ‘believing that identifying risks meant avoiding them’. Now Bendigo demonstrates the same pattern: external political pressure channelled through managerial frameworks to achieve what direct censorship cannot.
La Trobe’s own Professor Clare Wright, who resigned as guest curator for La Trobe sessions, is unequivocal about what she believes has happened, telling the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘I think this is what happens when arts and educational institutions are not prepared to stand on principle against the significant pressure from Zionist organisations and other conservative lobbyists and outlets’.
Her analysis exposes how risk management becomes the instrumentalised mechanism through which political pressure operates; a sanitised administrative process that achieves ideological compliance whilst maintaining plausible deniability about censorship.
This reveals the fundamental misalignment between corporate governance frameworks and the essential nature of artistic discourse, where provocation, dissent, and uncomfortable truths are not problems to be managed but vital democratic functions to be protected.
As Wright argued: ‘The idea that you can risk-manage your way out of uncomfortable conversations when there is a genocide unfolding in real time, when violence against women is at epidemic proportions, when neo-Nazis are marching down our city streets… these are all the difficult topics we can and must discuss, respectfully and lawfully, at writers festivals and in places of higher education.’
Read: Bendigo Writers Festival 2025: why we cancelled our panel
The chronology reveals how quickly trust can collapse when process failures meet political pressure. Just two days before the festival’s opening, some authors received a new code of conduct for the first time, linked to La Trobe University’s sponsorship. The code adopted specific definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Universities Australia framework, which critics argue can limit legitimate discussion about Israel and Gaza.
High-profile writers including Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, Evelyn Araluen, Jess Hill, and Thomas Mayo withdrew, citing concerns about the code’s framing and timing. The withdrawals included not only individual writers but entire panels, with participants citing solidarity with Palestinian and First Nations colleagues who felt particularly targeted by the code’s restrictions.
Professor Clare Wright resigned as guest curator for La Trobe sessions. By opening day, the festival confirmed it had ‘24 impacted sessions, 17 cancelled sessions and 48 participants have withdrawn (with a few cancelled due to all other participants in their session withdrawing)’.
Bendigo Writers Festival: the weaponisation of policy
Most festivals maintain general commitments against racism and harassment – reasonable standards for participant and audience safety. What distinguished Bendigo was not the existence of a code of conduct, but rather the specific contested definitions included, the last-minute delivery, and the absence of meaningful consultation with participants.
Standard festival protocols typically focus on respectful interaction between participants, prohibiting harassment or behaviour that makes others feel unsafe. These are generally accepted professional standards. However, Bendigo’s code went further, binding participants to La Trobe’s specific definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The Universities Australia definition of antisemitism extends beyond hatred of Jewish people to encompass certain criticisms of Israel. While intended to protect students and staff from genuine antisemitism, critics argue these definitions can be weaponised to silence legitimate political debate about Israeli policies. When applied to a public literary festival rather than a university campus, these definitions operate in a fundamentally different context with different expectations of open discourse.
The withdrawal of Palestinian-Australian academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, whose scholarship focuses on Islamophobia and racism, proves particularly telling. Her decision suggests that scholars these policies claim to protect felt the framework itself was discriminatory in application.
Bendigo writers festival: chilling effect in practice
Many writers experienced this as censorship, especially those whose lived experience connects directly to the subject matter. Even if the intent was promoting respectful discussion, timing and framing created perceptions of limiting certain viewpoints—generating the very chilling effect the festival presumably sought to avoid.
Institutions have duties to ensure safety and respect, but these can and should coexist with robust political debate. The challenge lies in designing processes that protect people from harm without shutting down legitimate critique. The festival could have handled this differently: being clear from the outset about expectations, involving artists in developing the code, and ensuring approaches balanced inclusivity with freedom of expression.
Bendigo Writers Festival: pattern of institutional retreat
This incident reflects deeper currents reshaping cultural institutions within an increasingly polarised environment. Following the pandemic, arts organisations have become more financially and reputationally fragile. Funding insecurity and politicised public discourse have made boards and sponsors more cautious, often prioritising ‘avoiding controversy’ over mission fidelity.
Recent Australian debates, from defunding controversial projects to Creative Australia’s Venice Biennale reversal, have signalled to institutions that political risk-minimisation represents a survival strategy. Yet this reactive pattern systematically undermines trust and credibility.
The instrumentalisation of safety represents perhaps the most concerning development. Over the past decade, ‘safe spaces’ have evolved from physical safety to encompass emotional and reputational safety, categories that prove both harder to define and easier to politicise. When safety becomes defined through avoiding offence, it collides directly with the arts’ tradition of provocation and dissent.
Bendigo Writers Festival: counter-examples
Not all literary festivals have responded with such institutional timidity. Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2023 provides instructive contrast. When three Ukrainian writers and a major sponsor withdrew after Palestinian-American writers made controversial social media comments, Director Louise Adler defended keeping all invited authors on the programme.
Her reasoning proved clear and principled: ‘I am interested in creating a context for courageous and brave spaces where we can have civil dialogue and discussion about ideas that we may not all agree on. If we all gather together just to agree with one another… I don’t think that’s the point of a literary festival.’
Adelaide chose to weather controversy to preserve diversity of perspectives, whilst Bendigo introduced restrictive policies to manage potential controversy, triggering mass withdrawals. The lesson proves clear: reactive controversy management consistently generates more fallout than it prevents.
Bendigo Writers Festival: stakes and symbolic damage
Festival spokesperson Julie Amos suggested the code’s intent may have been ‘lost in oversimplification,’ explaining they merely wanted to ‘provide parameters for safe and respectful conversations’. Whilst this represents a fair assertion, it doesn’t justify the material effect. Communication and symbolism matter profoundly in arts and cultural expression.
The approach suggests a paternalistic attitude toward audiences, presuming they need ‘protection’ from discourse the festival deems potentially ‘unsafe.’ This grossly underestimates contemporary audiences’ intellectual capacity to engage with complex discourse.
The festival’s founding director Rosemary Sorensen, who led the event for 15 years until it was taken over by Bendigo Council in 2024, was even more direct in her assessment, telling The Age that the attempt at censorship via the code of conduct represented an ‘authoritarian abuse of power’. The code’s requirement that participants avoid language or topics deemed ‘inflammatory, divisive, disrespectful’ effectively weaponised subjective judgements to constrain legitimate discourse. Sorensen questioned how ‘such a letter – which is so inflammatory, divisive and disrespectful – be sent out to writers?’
The approach suggests a paternalistic attitude toward audiences, presuming they need ‘protection’ from discourse the festival deems potentially ‘unsafe’. This grossly underestimates contemporary audiences’ intellectual capacity to engage with complex discourse.
The collective withdrawal of 48 participants demonstrates that writers perceived the code as crossing a line from reasonable professional standards into censorship. The damage extended beyond writers, with Bookish, the festival’s official bookseller, cancelling its partnership despite the financial impact, signalling how the controversy had undermined confidence across the festival’s ecosystem.
Bendigo Writers Festival: beyond risk aversion
The Bendigo crisis strips away illusions about Australian cultural leadership. This isn’t an isolated incident requiring patient explanation, but the inevitable outcome of a sector that has systematically abandoned its democratic function for risk-averse managerialism and pressure from powerful lobby groups. Australian cultural institutions are retreating from their founding purpose. They’ve become complicit in their own marginalisation, trading relevance for illusory safety.
Read: Bendigo Writers Festival has questions to answer over code of conduct
La Trobe’s exertion of pressure through the code generated far more negative publicity than any panel discussion was likely to produce. The university is now associated not with supporting literary culture but constraining it. This pattern repeats because institutions misunderstand where their greatest reputational risks lie.
Bendigo Writers Festival: the path forward
The writers who withdrew from Bendigo demonstrated principled resistance. Their collective action signals that the gradual erosion of cultural discourse, dressed in risk management and stakeholder relations language, has reached its limit.
Cultural institutions depend on trust relationships with multiple communities. When Palestinian, First Nations, and allied writers feel their perspectives are being pre-emptively constrained, authentic participation becomes impossible. Risk aversion isn’t neutral; avoiding controversy can damage credibility more than facing it.
Cultural leadership means holding space for complexity and dissent, not narrowing conversation. Until institutions acknowledge this crisis directly and develop courage to resist these patterns, they’ll continue presiding over the gradual suffocation of conversations democracy most urgently needs.
The question remains whether cultural institutions will recognise this as the warning it was intended to be, or continue their retreat into irrelevance, one compromised code of conduct at a time.
