FOI request for Adelaide Festival board minutes delayed until after election
The Adelaide Festival board has told InDaily it needs up to 85 days to find and deliver board minutes for a period of one month, after documents were requested under a Freedom of Information application.
New Adelaide Festival chair Judy Potter claims the Adelaide Festival Corporation can not meet a Freedom of Information request for one month’s worth of board minutes in the legislated 30 days saying the volume of material is “substantial”.
Potter said the board would instead provide the documents requested on January 14 “by April 9” – this would be after the March 21 state election and after the completion of Adelaide Festival 2026.
In a letter sent to InDaily, Potter said processing the application for access to board minutes would “substantially and unreasonably divert the corporation’s resources from… delivery of Adelaide Festival 2026”.
InDaily requested access to board minutes between the dates of December 14, 2025 and January 14, 2026.
Board chair Potter, appointed by the state government on January 13, said in the letter that the legislated 30 days to provide documentation was not long enough, and up to 85 days would be required to fulfil the request.
The response was criticised by shadow Arts Minister Jack Batty said it “should not take almost two months to compile” the board minutes.
“What has the government got to hide by obfuscating and delaying the release of these documents until after the election?” he said.
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“We need transparency around the decision-making process for Writers Week, especially when it has been such a major embarrassment for our state.
“Board minutes are regularly distributed and should not take almost two months to compile.”
When asked about the request, Premier Peter Malinauskas said: “I’ll tell you what I’m aware of, I’m aware of countless FOIs [to the Department of Premier and Cabinet] for documents and emails and board papers and so forth”.
“But I can’t comment on any of it specifically,” he said.
Asked whether he thought it was reasonable for Adelaide Festival to take almost three months to respond to a request for minutes, the Premier said there was a “clear process that has to be complied with to make sure everything’s done diligently and accurately”.
The application was made in the wake of the former Adelaide Festival board removing Sydney-born Palestinian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 Writers’ Week.
It sparked a national discussion over freedom of speech and led to the eventual cancellation of the Writers’ Week, which became untenable after more than 100 authors pulled out of the event in support of Abdel-Fattah.
The entire board, except for Adelaide City Council-appointed member Mary Couros, resigned in the wake of the disarray. A new board was then appointed, chaired by Judy Potter who led the Adelaide Festival board from 2016 to 2023.
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One of Potter’s first moves was to apologise “unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused” Dr Abdel-Fattah and extended an invitation for her to speak at Writers’ Week 2027.
In her letter dated January 29, Potter said Adelaide Festival Corporation was unable to make a determination on InDaily’s FOI request within the statutory timeframe as it “encompasses a substantial volume of material” and that “identifying, retrieving, and reviewing this volume of material will require extensive and time-intensive searches across multiple record-keeping systems”.
She also said: “processing the application within the current timeframe would substantially and unreasonably divert the corporation’s resources from its other operations, the most significant being delivery of Adelaide Festival 2026”.
InDaily intends to apply for a review of the decision under the Freedom of Information Act 1991.
Under the Adelaide Festival Corporation Act 1998, the board must meet six times per year at a minimum.
Today, InDaily asked Adelaide Festival and outgoing Arts Minister Andrea Michaels, who appoints members to the board and is the Corporation’s responsible minister, to confirm how many times the board met during the one-month period under the FOI application. Adelaide Festival was unable to comment.
InDaily also asked an Adelaide Festival spokesperson to confirm whether the minutes were distributed to members after any meetings during that period, but she said she could not comment.
New board appointment
Meanwhile, Adelaide Festival Corporation has announced the appointment of Tam Nguyen to the new board.
Nguyen has extensive experience in delivering arts festivals and is currently the co-director of Turning World, a boutique cultural agency connecting cultures in Australia and the Asia Pacific.
She is also senior curator of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts, and has previously worked for Tasmanian arts festival MONA FOMA, Doc/Fest in the UK and Australia Week Festival in the USA.
Nguyen joins former 7NEWS anchor Jane Doyle, who is on the State Opera board, and Financial Services businessperson John Irving AM, who has previously served on the State Theatre Company and State Opera boards.
*Editor’s Note: The former chair of the Adelaide Festival Tracey Whiting AM is also a director of Solstice Media, publisher of InDaily.
