Two words cost Macklemore his place on Ed Sheeran’s tour. In Australia the same playbook has cost artists their work seven times in under three years, and Special Envoy Jillian Segal wants it written into arts funding. Josh Barnett investigates.
Macklemore and the stadium owner
At MetLife Stadium, Macklemore said two words “very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.”
The lobby moved within days. The Anti-Defamation League called it “performative, biased and hateful anti-Israel ‘activism'” and accused Macklemore of “falsely accusing Israel of genocide”.
The Israeli-American Council launched a petition urging Sheeran and his management to drop him from the remaining dates, and demanded action from Live Nation, one of the world’s largest concert promoters.
Robert Kraft, owner of Gillette Stadium, confirmed he barred him. On 14 September Sheeran’s promoter said venues “will not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the lineup,” Rolling Stone reported.
We’ve watched the same playbook run here: a lobby group writes the letter, a petition supplies the noise, and someone who controls the venue, the funding or the board makes the call. Nobody ever speaks to the artist.
This is Part 2 of MWM’s investigation into antisemitism rules in arts funding. Part 1 showed the IHRA definition being pushed into the sector with no funding body formally adopting it.
You go to the people they need
At a Palestine Justice Movement forum in Sydney last year, St Vincent’s Hospital heart transplant specialist Professor Peter MacDonald raised with the panel whether Mossad was behind antisemitic attacks in Australia.
On 2 September, three doctors from the Alliance Against Antisemitism in Healthcare complained. Not to him. To St Vincent’s Hospital, and to NSW Health Minister Ryan Park, demanding his “immediate suspension”.
St Vincent’s condemned him before it investigated him.
Two weeks after the complaint he was on leave, and a month on still wasn’t back at work.
You go to the people they need: the employer, the board, the donors, the minister. It has worked for years without a rulebook.
What the Envoy wants in funding agreements
The Federal Government adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in 2021 under PM Scott Morrison. Seven of its eleven examples are about Israel.
Special Envoy Jillian Segal wants terms written into “all public funding agreements with cultural institutions or festivals to allow for the efficient termination of funding.”
Put that clause in an arts funding agreement, and the person deciding what counts is the person paying for your play.
The complainers: 7 cases under 3 years
November 2023. Three Sydney Theatre Company actors take the opening-night curtain call of The Seagull in keffiyehs. They say nothing. STC apologises. Donors withdraw.
December 2023. Antoinette Lattouf is taken off ABC Radio Sydney after reposting a Human Rights Watch video. The Federal Court finds her political opinion on Gaza was among the reasons. The ABC pays $70,000 compensation and a $150,000 penalty.
February 2025. Creative Australia names Khaled Sabsabi for the Venice Biennale. After articles in The Australian and a Senate question, the board dumps him six days later. He’s reinstated in July.
March 2025. Kellee Green ends her Queensland Music Awards speech with “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Brisbane City Council withdraws its funding from the whole awards program. They didn’t defund Kellee Green. They defunded every other musician in Queensland.
November 2025. Gomeroi and Ngiyampaa musician Jayden Kitchener-Waters is told his guitar, painted “Free Gaza”, is too political to play at NSW Parliament. The performance is cancelled and he’s placed under investigation.
January 2026. Adelaide Writers’ Week drops Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah. Around 180 writers withdraw and on 13 January the whole festival collapses.
April 2026. The University of Queensland Press pulls Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money’s children’s book Bila, a river cycle, over an essay its illustrator Matt Chun wrote about the Bondi massacre. The dean cites the university’s “adopted definition of antisemitism.” Nobody says a word or picture in the book is antisemitic.
Six of these attacks needed no definition. The seventh had one, and the person who paid was the poet who never said anything.
That’s what the definition adds: a rule to point at. A complaint stops being an opinion, and becomes a breach.
The Sydney Theatre Company code
At Senate Estimates in May, Arts department secretary Jim Betts said the Envoy regards STC’s unpublished code of conduct as “good practice” and his department is examining “its applicability more widely within the sector.” This week STC sent it to MWM. Version two came into force in January 2025, 14 months after that curtain call.
Clause 3.26 bans onstage any
“item of clothing, badge, slogan or ribbon”
that could damage STC’s “public image, economic interests and reputation”, or offend “audience members, patrons, donors, sponsors.” Breach it and you can be terminated, cast or volunteer.
There is no definition of antisemitism in it. What it protects is a reputation, a commercial position, and the people who write the cheques.
Creative Australia’s acting chief executive Tim Blackwell told Estimates the government’s definition is “obviously, adopted and accepted by Creative Australia.” Nine weeks later, at the Royal Commission, his own statement says none of its policies define antisemitism.
STC has a code. NSW Parliament has a code. Creative Australia has a clause. Not one defines the thing it polices, and every one worked.
Adopted everywhere. Written nowhere.
Creative Victoria’s agreement already lets the department cut you off if your association “may be detrimental to the reputation of the Department”. Seven agencies won’t publish their agreements at all.
Who is behind the complaints
STC’s code names who you write to instead of the artist: patrons, donors, sponsors. For the sector, it’s the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. When a barrister at the Royal Commission put it to health regulator AHPRA that a doctor could be reported for calling Gaza a genocide, ECAJ’s own senior counsel objected.
And the Envoy’s family trust gave $50,000 to Advance, the hard-right campaign group, making it Advance’s second-largest donor that year. Jillian Segal says she had no involvement in her husband’s donations.
In America, Robert Kraft owned the building. Here, they don’t need to. They just need the funding agreement.
The Royal Commission reports on 18 December.
Muzzling speech by stealth. How Segal is imposing her antisemitism regime on the arts
Josh is a professional musician and cameraman who is now working with Michael West Media to develop The West Report and other visual content across major social media channels.
Josh is a professional musician and cameraman who is now working with Michael West Media to develop The West Report and other visual content across major social media channels