The Adelaide festival board’s decision – despite my strongest opposition – to disinvite the Australian Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide writers’ week weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation, where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t.

In the aftermath of the Bondi atrocity, state and federal governments have rushed to mollify the “we told you so” posse. With alarming insouciance protests are being outlawed, free speech is being constrained and politicians are rushing through processes to ban phrases and slogans.

Now religious leaders are to be policed, universities monitored, the public broadcaster scrutinised and the arts starved. Are you or have you ever been a critic of Israel? Joe McCarthy would be cheering on the inheritors of his tactics.

Artists have always been a problem for the state and interest groups but the confrontations have intensified as a consequence of the war on Gaza. Exploiting the rhetoric of social cohesion, crises have proliferated: the acceptance of Israeli government funding by the Sydney festival in 2022, the sanctioning of young actors in keffiyehs at the Sydney Theatre Company, Jayson Gillham’s cancelled concert by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the initial removal of Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale, the State Library of Victoria’s cancellation of a teen writing program, the collapse of the Bendigo writers’ festival and a legion of arts organisations who have quietly yielded to pressure to program this artist and not program that artist.

In my view, boards composed of individuals with little experience in the arts, and blind to the moral implications of abandoning the principle of freedom of expression, have been unnerved by the pressure exerted by politicians calculating their electoral prospects and relentless, coordinated letter-writing campaigns.

In 2023 AWW programmed a handful of sessions devoted to contemporary Palestinian writers. Propagandists leapt to exhume, misrepresent and misquote social media posts to cultivate the conditions for cancelling writers. The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, took exception to one writer’s tweets, expressing his personal distaste, as was his right as a citizen in a democratic country.

It was heartening then to listen to his subsequent speech to a packed Town Hall audience. He shared his thinking about the arts, their role in society and the responsibility of the government of the day. He confessed that he had thought of withdrawing our funding. And he concluded that if “politicians decide what is culturally appropriate … it leads us to a future in which politicians can directly stifle events that are themselves predicated on freedom of speech … it’s a path that leads us into the territory of Putin’s Russia”.

His speech remains a model for political leaders confronted by art that might personally offend them, damage their electoral prospects or agitate noisy interest groups.

The Adelaide festival board has now cancelled my invitation to Abdel-Fattah, who was to discuss her latest novel, Discipline, because of concerns about “cultural sensitivity” – and the premier has backed the decision. As a consequence, as at the time of writing, more than 180 writers have withdrawn.

One can only assume that in due course these concerns might also be cited by opponents of free speech to demand the cancellation or silencing of others who have demanded justice for Palestinian people, writers who include Kenneth Roth, Francesca Albanese and Najwan Darwish. Many years ago the former premier Don Dunstan touted Adelaide as the “Athens of the south”. Now South Australia’s tourism slogan could be “Welcome to Moscow on the Torrens”.

The board’s statement cites community cohesion, an oft-referenced anxiety which should be treated with scepticism. This is a managerialist term intended to stop thinking. Who, after all, would argue in favour of social division? Presumably only a terrorist or a nihilist. The raison d’être of art and literature is to disrupt the status quo: and one doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of “social cohesion” is propaganda.

The arts have allegedly become “unsafe” and artists are a danger to the community’s psycho-social wellbeing. But, let’s be quite clear, the routine invocation of “safety” is code for “I don’t want to hear your opinion”. In this instance, it appears to apply only to a Palestinian invitee.

The increasingly extreme and repressive efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists to stifle even the mildest criticism has had a chilling effect on free speech and democratic institutions. The new mantra “Bondi changed everything” has offered this lobby, its stenographers in the media and a spineless political class yet another coercive weapon. Hence, in 2026, the board, in an atmosphere of intense political pressure, has issued an edict that an author is to be cancelled.

In the 65-year history of Adelaide writers’ week there have been no civil disturbances apart from the occasional harrumph about the coffee queues or the plaintive query as to why the croissants are filled with pumpkin. One might ask if any of the “concerned” individuals have ventured into the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens, where more than 160,000 enthusiasts have congregated every year since 2023.

Of course there is no way to protect any of us anywhere from a lone violent extremist (although stronger gun laws are an obvious starting point). But the reality is that the citizens who come to AWW are intensely courteous (beyond the rush to claim a seat), listen with the utmost respect to writers and then head into the book tent to buy stacks of books.

But none of this has influenced the decision: a writer is to be cancelled after pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists, bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians.

I cannot be party to silencing writers so, with a heavy heart, I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW. Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us.

We need writers now more than ever, as our media closes up, as our politicians grow daily more cowed by real power, as Australia grows more unjust and unequal.

AWW is the canary in the coalmine. Friends and colleagues in the arts, beware of the future.

They are coming for you.

• Louise Adler was the director of Adelaide writers’ week from 2023 to 2026. She is on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia