What We Lose When Institutions Lose Their Nerve
For most of my adult life, the ABC was not just a media organisation. It was part of the architecture of my days.
ABC Radio Melbourne’s Drive was how I oriented myself to the world. It was where politics, culture, law, and public life were interrogated with seriousness and curiosity. In my family, the ABC was trusted. Not uncritically, but instinctively. It was assumed to be independent, rigorous, and guided by a deeper sense of public responsibility.
Then, sometime after December 2023, I stopped listening.
Not dramatically. Not consciously. I didn’t announce it to myself or make a principled declaration. I simply… switched off.
I hadn’t really examined this until now. Which in itself is strange. How does something so central to one’s daily life disappear without deliberate thought?
The answer, I think, lies in what happened to Antoinette Lattouf — and what that revealed about the ABC. The issue resurfaced in my mind, I believe, because of what occurred with Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival.
A Quiet Severing of Trust
When the ABC removed Antoinette Lattouf from her hosting role on ABC Radio Sydney in December 2023, I registered it as troubling. When the Federal Court later ruled that her termination was unlawful, that she had been removed in part because of her political views opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, something more fundamental shifted.
It wasn’t just that the ABC had made a bad decision. Institutions do that. It was that the broadcaster I had trusted to be independent had buckled under pressure, and then defended that decision until it was forced, legally, to stop.
The court found that senior ABC management reacted to a campaign of complaints from pro-Israel lobbyists, and that those complaints materially shaped their actions. The ABC’s own internal communications, aired in court, suggested panic, reputational fear, and an overriding concern with managing fallout. Not with defending journalistic principle.
When the managing director later said the matter had not been handled “in line with our values and expectations,” it felt less like accountability than damage control.
Something in me disengaged — not in anger, but in disillusionment. And disillusionment is harder to reverse.
It was a quiet severing of trust, and I began to see it everywhere.
Why I Didn’t Notice Myself Leaving
I’ve wondered why I didn’t consciously notice myself withdrawing from the ABC. Why it happened quietly, without ritual or resolve. Part of the answer, I think, lies in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the complicity of many Western governments and institutions, which have, at worst, facilitated the genocide through political, military, and economic support, or at best, remained wilfully blind.
Public discourse has felt increasingly distorted since then. Moral clarity has been replaced with institutional equivocation. The killing of tens of thousands of civilians has been narrated as “complex,” while expressions of solidarity with Palestinians have been treated as suspect, dangerous, or disruptive.
In that context, the ABC’s handling of Lattouf didn’t feel like an aberration. It felt like confirmation. Confirmation that something fundamental had shifted, not just at the ABC, but across Australian institutions.
Perhaps that’s why I didn’t mourn my departure. It didn’t feel like a loss; it felt like an inevitability. When I started tuning out, I wasn’t abandoning the ABC over a single decision.
I was leaving behind a pattern.
A pattern that revealed a fundamental shift in institutional values. Once an institution moves to protect its reputation over its principles, trust begins to erode, quietly but surely.
Seeing the Pattern Elsewhere
As the controversies at the Bendigo Writers Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week unfolded, I recognised the same institutional reflex at work. These events weren’t isolated incidents, but part of a pattern that demonstrates how deeply reputational fear is embedded in Australian institutions… and the consequences of that fear.
In Bendigo, a last-minute code of conduct, introduced after pressure regarding the participation of Randa Abdel-Fattah, was framed as protective. But writers read it as constraining, selective, and politically loaded. More than fifty authors withdrew.
In Adelaide, the decision to rescind Abdel-Fattah’s invitation, justified as “cultural sensitivity” following the Bondi attack, crossed a different line. It was not merely risk-averse; it was incoherent. The implication that a Palestinian-Australian writer’s presence was somehow inappropriate in the wake of violence she had nothing to do with was deeply unsettling.
The outcome was catastrophic: mass withdrawals, resignations, international embarrassment, and the cancellation of one of Australia’s most respected literary events.
These were not isolated failures. They were variations on the same theme. Institutions willing to compromise principles for reputation management, rather than taking a stand, ultimately lose both.
Institutions Misunderstand What Reputation Is
What these organisations seem not to understand is that reputation is not preserved by appeasement.
Reputation is built and sustained through consistency between stated values and actual behaviour. When institutions abandon their principles under pressure, they don’t appear neutral or responsible; they appear hollow.
From the outside, the message is clear:
- Independence is conditional
- Diversity has limits
- Free expression is negotiable
For people like me, that realisation is quietly decisive. It’s not that I stopped listening to the ABC out of anger. I stopped because I no longer believed it knew who it was.
It wasn’t just about Lattouf, or even Gaza. It was about something bigger: the erosion of trust in a public institution that had once been an anchor of clarity.
In conclusion…
I wonder whether this is why things cannot simply “return to normal.”
October 7 and the genocide in Gaza did not just reshape geopolitics; they exposed fault lines in Western institutions that had long been papered over. Many organisations revealed, under pressure, whose voices they would protect and whose they would treat as expendable.
Once seen, that cannot be unseen.
The ABC may reform policies. Writers’ festivals may issue apologies. Boards may resign. But the deeper damage, the quiet withdrawal of trust by audiences who once felt at home, is harder to quantify, and harder to repair.
I didn’t rage at the ABC. I did something much worse for an institution that depends on public faith.
I quietly and permanently switched off.
The Cultural Nomad 
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