The cost of speaking out

The first festival I ever attended came in the form of a protest.  The 1970 ‘Pornfest’, held in a packed Sydney University lecture theatre, consisted of readings of poems, stories and extracts from novels that had been banned by Customs or could find no Australian publisher bold enough to take a risk.

One of my more recent festival visits was to chair a 2006 Sydney Writers Festival panel about whether the media could be relied upon to report the full story. Guests included Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who talked about how she hoped her journalism would show Russian citizens the importance of free speech. The price was living each day knowing death could be around the next corner. Just a few months later, Politkovskaya was tragically murdered in Russia.

Two places in which I would expect support for free speech are universities and writers’ festivals. So I was surprised to find myself at last year’s Writers’ Festival distributing Festival News, the daily festival newspaper produced by UTS journalism students, because Festival management would not allow it to be deposited for Festival goers to pick up.  The Festival has suspended Festival News, which is funded by UTS.

I continue to be surprised by the organisers of the Sydney Writers Festival. I was taken aback when some journalists who proposed an event for this year’s Festival about ‘rebels and causes’ were told that, as a result of the 2008 events, it could not go on if I was part of the panel.

Fortunately, Alternative Media Group has stepped in. After Festival organisers made it clear that it would not support the continuation of Festival News this year, Lawrence Gibbons approached UTS Journalism with an offer to buttress free speech. On arts events over the next six months, UTS students will report independently, supported by Lawrence Gibbons and his team.

The underlying issue behind these minor incidents was whether Festival News, which was funded by UTS, should be restricted to promoting the Festival and its sponsors or if it could be an independent publication in which a negative audience response to the then NSW Minister for the Arts and reports on books sales and queues might be included, as well as reports about Festival performances.

I doubt that the Festival’s sponsors, who include the NSW government, The Sydney Morning Herald, wine, car, advertising and banking companies, booksellers and publishers would have noticed the few offending reports. The significant point is that Festival management was worried that they would be offended.

Australian arts production is heavily subsidised by government and corporate sponsors.  There is nothing wrong with that. The larger question is – how much does sponsorship lead to censorship, safe art and muted criticism? Are student journalists and young artists and writers to be taught early to play it safe? What happens to those who do not conform?

A recent example of how governments and their funding bodies can use their power to attempt to control artists was the Australia Council’s compliance with a Rudd government request to develop protocols for artists working with children. This followed last year’s moral panic around artist Bill Henson’s photographs of adolescents.

Award-winning author Frank Moorhouse, a strong campaigner against literary censorship in the 1970s, has opposed the new rules as threatening the independence of arts funding. “Suppression of information and freedom of expression by law, by filters and by protocols denies us full acquaintance with reality, and consequently makes our judgments less reliable and our lives unsafe. The suppressed material turns into phantoms in the dark and is transformed into the forbidden; in turn it becomes an underground commodity with a distorted potency,” he wrote in a recent ‘Manifesto for the Imagination’ in the Griffith Review. The Australia’s Council’s response to its critics was that while it supported freedom of expression, artists must abide by community standards. Since when?  ‘Protecting community standards’ is precisely how Australian authorities in the 1970s justified a ridiculous censorship regime.

These Australian events may seem trivial when compared to Politkovskaya’s death and censorship of writers and journalists under other regimes. Just last week, journalists attempting to resist government censorship in Fiji were detained or thrown out of the country. The media spotlight is on Fiji this week, but will its collective lack of interest in the Pacific soon be restored allowing the Fijian government to rule its citizens with unwelcome scrutiny?

For months, the Sri Lankan government has allowed no journalists into northwestern Sri Lanka where last week its army massacred civilians queuing for milk. Earlier in the year, the Israeli government blocked international media from entering Gaza to cover the impact of its bombing campaign on civilians.

We know about this latest Sri Lankan massacre only because Channel 4 and other overseas media have published video and interviews shot by Tamil sources inside the war zone. So far Australian media have chosen not to do so, leaving most Australians ignorant of these events.  International journalists warn that if we allow the Sri Lankan government’s censorship to dictate the terms of coverage and turn away from the humanitarian crisis, we may be complicit in their war crimes.

Back in Australia, the Federal government is proposing Internet censorship of the kind only used by the most draconian regimes. Meanwhile, the Australian Communication and Media Authority Internet Black List, which it refused to release under Freedom of Information laws, turned up on a site called Wikileaks last month, demonstrating once again how difficult censorship is in the age of the Internet. The inclusion of several websites which clearly had nothing to do with pornography or extreme violence on the black list supported Wikileaks’ argument that secret censorship schemes “whatever their original intent are inevitably corrupted.”

As usual, this year’s Writers Festival will provide lots of occasions to think and talk about free speech and censorship, however it is packaged. But for freedom of expression to be more than a statement of good intent  we need to defend it, whenever and wherever it is threatened, whether by censors in distant places or through the fragile sensibilities of corporations and arts bureaucracies.

Student journalists need to learn about the cost of silence and the price of speaking out.  It’s unfortunate that the Sydney Writers Festival chooses to deliver an object lesson in the latter.

By Wendy Bacon

Wendy Bacon is Professor of Journalism and Director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS.