What’s not to like about the laughter and affability of Adelaide Writers’ Week?

The scene of Adelaide’s grey-haired cultural cream, sitting in the sun in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, with a glass of wine and a book, invites the spirit of that most bourgeois painter, Claude Monet.

These festivals are pointless propaganda exercises for the cultural left, hawking identity politics to people (a sea of ‘Joans’), who in the main, drive BMWs, Volvos and Mercedes around Adelaide’s leafy eastern suburbs.

In her keynote speech at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, novelist Lionel Shriver spoke on the damage identity politics could do to a writer.

“Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all… the kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.”

Much as the Catholic Church demanded fig leaves over private parts in paintings in the late Middle Ages, contemporary moral arbiters reject as impure, stories that contain a hint of incorrect politics, such as Palestinians fighting not only for their homeland but survival at the hands of a far right Israeli government.

At worst, these festivals produce a caramelised group think, where the most pressing question of the day is, ‘do you want a glass of red or white?’

On the monument at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden in Adelaide you’ll find the words, “The hours vanish yet they are recorded.”

This Writers’ Week the right to free speech wasn’t vanquished.

Let us record thanks to Louse Adler.