Public ideas from Adelaide Writers’s Week

Rotunda

In three consecutive nights, Late Night Live has been broadcasting one-hour sessions from Adelaide Writers’ Week. The discussions, guided by David Marr, are wide-ranging, but a unifying theme is the question “how did we get here in our public lives?”.

Monday – The state of the nation: has the myth of the “fair go” been broken?, with Rebecca Huntley, Bob Carr and Rick Morton. They are all asked to answer the question “what do we no longer take for granted in Australia?”. Spoiler – they generally agree that Australia has become meaner over their lifetimes, in different ways.

Tuesday – The state of the self: have we lost a sense of community in a post-pandemic world?, with Julia Baird, Geraldine Brooks and Rachel Kushner. Because a society’s retreat from collectively leads to more unequal outcomes, there is a continuation of the themes in the Monday session, and contrary to the title, it goes back well before there was a pandemic. US-Australia differences another strong theme.

Wednesday – The state of the world: the rise of Orbán, Trump and Netanyahu, with Wesley Lowrey and John Crace. Authoritarianism was bound to be the dominant theme. The discussion is largely about people’s attraction to Trump, and his extraordinary ability to tap into the issues causing people anxiety: his skills are those of the successful celebrity. Trump is successfully eradicating 60 years of what liberals see as progress, but which Trump’s supporters see as a reversion to America before the old order was broken by those with political agendas around gender and racial equality, social justice, civil rights and environmental concerns.