Sydney University newspaper uninvites news.com.au Political Editor Samantha Maiden from speaking at event

News.com.au

05-06-2025

Thirty years after I enjoyed the honour of editing the student newspaper On Dit at Adelaide University and engaged in all of the traditional undergraduate ratbaggery, perhaps it was only a matter of time before I got cancelled.
As it turns out that moment arrived this week, in the form of the politburo running the student newspaper Honi Soit.
In March, a lovely person called Imogen kindly invited me to Honi Soit 's student newspaper conference at Sydney University.
'No doubt you are a very busy person, and have lots of fantastic opportunities offered to you. However, I am hoping that you would be willing to speak in an interview for an event at our conference, to talk to a room of young Australian journalists about your work in federal politics and your role as the political editor for news.com.au,'' she wrote.
'I can say on behalf of the attendees that we would be honoured to hear you speak, and that it would really be a highlight of the conference.'
Given my background as a former Adelaide university newspaper editor, where I attended with Penny Wong, Natasha Stott-Despoja, Mark Butler, Adelaide Festival director Jo Dyer and the journalists Annabel Crabb and David Penberthy in their undergraduate heydays, I thought it might be fun, and I could even take my son who is 17, who might enjoy seeing Sydney University.
I even dug out some old photographs of myself with my co-editor Vanessa Almeida.
As an aside there is a huge missed opportunity here. Honi Soit should have waited to flash mob me at the actual event and scream obscenities at me, which my teenage son may have enjoyed quite a lot.
But I digress. Although I had considered doing the conference by zoom, I had proposed to catch the train down to spend time with my son and friends. Naturally, I was doing it for free.
Alas, this charming train journey to Sydney will not occur as it turns out I am, unbeknownst to myself, a sleeper radical on the issue of Israel.
It all came into sharp focus following a mysterious investigation by the Honi Soit editors.
This week, they wrote a solemn email cancelling my attendance at the conference that they had asked me to attend, citing unspecified thought crimes involving Palestine.
'We are reaching out regarding your involvement in the 2025 Student Journalism Conference,'' they wrote.
'We have received community concerns about your political coverage and reporting on the Palestinian genocide.
'As a left-wing newspaper, Honi Soit recognises that Israel is committing an ongoing genocide in Palestine and we do not feel that our values align, or that we can platform your work as a result.'
The truly weird aspect of this bizarre cancelling is I don't recall writing anything about Palestine recently at all, let alone anything controversial.
I have literally no idea what they are on about, and regardless, even if I had written something or said something controversial that the Honi Soit editors did not agree with, so what?
As it turns out, it matters quite a good deal to the editors of Honi Soit who are determined to build themselves a Peter Dutton style echo chamber where they only talk to people who they agree with.
'It is important to us that the speakers at the Student Journalism Conference have views that we can stand by, and in light of the reception to the announcement of your event, we do not feel that we can host you as a speaker at our conference,'' they wrote.
'We apologise for the inconvenience.'
At first, I regarded it as some sort of amusing joke.
But the more I thought about I reflected on how troubling it is that these sensitive petals at Sydney University, a good proportion of whom come from wealthy families, private schools and the world of mummy and daddy paying for their rent, are in such a froth about people that they think may think differently to them.
Another panellist, the ABC broadcaster David Marr, kindly wrote a letter in support of free speech in solidarity.
He's deplatforming himself from the conference.
'Imogen, I've just learned that you've deplatformed Sam Maiden because of 'concerns' about her 'political coverage','' he wrote.
'That's not my idea of how a good newspaper – let alone a student paper – should behave. Isn't the point of Honi Soit and a conference of this kind to examine different – and perhaps uncomfortable views – about the big issues of the day?
I'm out.'
And I didn't have to dig far into the archives of Honi Soit to find writer Robbie Mason, a self-described 'anarchist' with a very hot take on all of this in an article titled: Cancel culture is a dumb, toxic, liberal phenomenon antithetical to leftist organising.
'Cancel culture is an evangelical headhunting mission centred on public humiliation, ostracism and guilt by association,'' he wrote.
'When I think of cancel culture in its current form, I think of micro-transgressions and microaggressions. Rumours. Fight versus flight. Tears on bedroom carpets, downward glances in corridors and Twitter warriors emboldened by the poisonous sting of a keyboard.
'This encampment – this safe space – has transformed into a towering fortress. It is built upon the smeared reputations and social corpses of the most vulnerable in society – young activists, people of colour and non-university educated workers, for instance.
'As an anarchist, I am distrustful of a technocratic elite replicating the behaviour of ruling classes.
'Academic writing leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Forcing readers to continually decode the meaning of research and jargon ensures an intellectual elite remains in control of society and dominates public discourse – albeit an intellectual elite often with their hearts in the right place. This is nonetheless a form of power and hierarchy.
'As an anarchist, I am inclined to distrust hegemonic leftist arguments and mob rule.'
Me too, Robbie Mason, Me too.
In fact, the whole affair reminded me of Milan Kundera's first novel, The Joke, which describes how a student's private joke derails his life.
Naturally, the author was my special study in Year 12 English. The novel opens with Ludvik back in his hometown in Moravia, where he is shocked to realise he recognises the woman cutting his hair, though neither acknowledges the other.
In the novel, he reflects on the joke that changed his life in the early 1950s, when he was a supporter of the Communist regime.
A girl in his class wrote to him about 'optimistic young people filled through and through with the healthy spirit' of Marxism; he replied caustically, 'Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!'
Pressured to share the contents of the letter with others in the Communist Party at school, Ludvik is unanimously expelled from the Party and from the college.
Having lost his student exemption, he is drafted into the Czech military where alleged subversives formed work brigades, and spent the next few years working in the mines at a labor camp in Ostrava.
I shall report back how it goes for me in Ostrava. Wish me luck.