Samantha Maiden may have been ‘cancelled’, but the real victim is the student body
As David Marr rightly points out, “Isn’t the point of Honi Soit and a conference of this kind to examine different – perhaps uncomfortable views – about the big issues of the day?"
Editing a student newspaper is a pretty rough gig. You get paid a piddling sum to develop pitches with reporters, write your own stories, edit the half-baked ramblings of undergraduate contributors (assuming they’ve bothered to file anything on deadline) and finally lay it all up for print on a student union computer older than you. In between all of this, you somehow have to find the time to, you know, complete your degree.
On that basis, I have a lot of respect for the current crop of editors helming Honi Soit, the University of Sydney’s student newspaper. I have written for Honi Soit throughout my studies, and have nothing but good things to say about my experience of the editorial team this year. In particular, I commend their efforts to keep the Student Media Conference started by the 2024 editorial team running for a second year in a row.
But they’ve had a blunder this week. On Thursday, Samantha Maiden, political editor of news.com.au, penned a scathing op-ed that revealed Honi Soit had rescinded her invitation to appear at the 2025 edition of the conference, slated to be held in August.
The decision to uninvite Maiden, a former editor of On Dit, the University of Adelaide’s student newspaper, was ostensibly based on the ‘community concerns about [Maiden’s] political coverage and reporting on the Palestinian genocide’. However, the immediate reaction appeared to be coming from the other direction. In response to Honi Soit’s decision to ‘deplatform’ Maiden, fellow pannellist and host of ABC’s Late Night Live David Marr has also since pulled out of the conference. On X (formerly known as Twitter), veteran political journalist Malcolm Farr deemed Marr’s decision to follow Maiden out the “correct move”.
Despite her protestations to the contrary, the notion that Maiden has been “cancelled” is farcical. She’s a long-serving member of the press gallery, who has won awards and accolades. News.com.au is one of the most-read news sites in Australia. Her platform is in no way diminished by the loss of an opportunity to address a room of student media junkies, budding political hacks and the odd lecture-theatre residing cockroach.
She has survived far more bruising attacks from people with a lot more power than a handful of student newspaper editors. In 2016, former Coalition minister and opposition leader Peter Dutton called Maiden a “mad fucking witch” in a text he accidentally sent to her. The text was meant for Jamie Briggs, Dutton’s one-time ministerial colleague who, after being dumped from the outer ministry over an incident involving a female DFAT staffer, had circulated a photo of the staffer in question that ended up on the front page of a national newspaper. Maiden had been highly critical of Briggs, describing his conduct as “dumb as all get out” and noting he had “failed the test” on Ministerial integrity. It’s worth noting this is not exactly the sort of softball coverage of Coalition MPs you’d expect a student newspaper, even an avowedly left-wing one, to take issue with.
Bemoaning Maiden’s cancellation obfuscates the real losers of Honi Soit’s decision: that is, the small, but switched-on audience of students interested in media, current affairs and politics who attend events of this ilk. Some of these attendees would have taken issue with Maiden’s reporting of the conflict in the Middle East, or the broader editorial line pursued by news.com.au’s publisher, News Corp Australia.
Rather than take the knee-jerk step of disinviting Maiden altogether, Honi could have engaged this audience by preparing a series of tough questions for the panel on their coverage of the horror unfolding in Gaza. They could have opened up discussion to the floor, where student activist attendees could have conducted a grilling of their own. These are questions and debates we will now never have the benefit of hearing.
Of course, there should be sensible limits placed on who can appear on campus and how they should appear. If Honi Soit had invited and subsequently uninvited Steve Bannon to the Student Media Conference for example, I’d defend that as a sage course correction. This isn’t simply because Bannon is a more extremist figure. Rather, I think these difficult free-speech issues are best resolved by considering the risk of harm posed by inviting any given speaker to the student body and broader public. This is a better, more objective standard: importantly, it does not turn on mere political difference. As Marr rightly highlighted in his email to conference advisors following Maiden’s uninviting, “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?”
It’s tempting to think of this as just the latest episode in a long-running series of speaking events at Sydney University that have been disrupted or cancelled because of the machinations of left-wing student activists in the past. Such a comparison is misleading. For one, this level of ire has usually been reserved for far more contentious figures like Bettina Ardnt, and – infamously – Malcolm Turnbull. This incident is particularly chilling because Sam Maiden is a journalist. What’s more, opposition to these speakers is usually expressed once they are actually on campus. Whatever you think about the protest tactics deployed at such events, students at least had to (and by all accounts, wanted to) show up to express their discontent with these speakers, rather than relying on an email to shut down debate.
I began my degree at Sydney University just before the COVID-19 pandemic began, and have watched student life thrive, falter and stutter back to life after waves of rolling health restrictions. I am reluctant to pile on Honi Soit, and its publisher, the University of Sydney SRC, because they are some of the few student organisations left running events to try and entice people back onto campus. Moreover, student journalists will always be critical of the politics and output of high-profile speakers invited to campus. If it’s not their duty, it’s most certainly their right.
Maiden’s piece was unduly personal at times, decrying the Honi Soit editors as "sensitive petals” whose “mummy and daddy [are] paying for their rent”, a claim I’d be interested to know if she has any evidence for. It strikes me that long after her tirades against wokeism and cancel culture have finished ringing in students’ ears, they’ll still be left with an enfeebled university political culture incapable of even sustaining a journalist’s appearance on campus for fear the political differences will be too great.