It was a stoic little gathering of Craig Thomson loyalists in the Celebrity Room of City Tatts in Sydney. Promoted as a rally and a $150-a-head fund-raiser, some 30 to 40 turned up and chatted quietly around the walls with beer and kebabs. They were Labor voters, getting on in years, who did not believe the fraud allegations against the federal Member or who felt sympathy for him in his troubles. But the Labor party, now distancing itself from Thomson, sent no representatives. (Around the room were posters of Thomson, the clean-cut ‘Independent’ with a big smile.) Nor were there any reporters present. Thomson’s loyal father Jack was there; his wife Zoe was home in Bateau Bay ‘looking after the kids’. There were three speakers: Thomson, Chris McCardle his solicitor, and Bob Ellis his minstrel.

Thomson never doubted, he said, the support of his Central Coast community. The other day, campaigning at Wyong station around 4.30 a.m., Thomson found the commuters were overwhelmingly onside. McCardle described Thomson as ‘a decent person who has done nothing wrong’. Ellis saw him as a ‘good, unflinching, high-spirited, buoyant and long-suffering’ parliamentarian who should be deputy prime minister. But what really held the speakers together was their barely controlled rage. Thomson let fly at Tony Abbott who should not be permitted to serve in parliament. ‘I will do everything in my power to stop him becoming prime minister.’ (Cheers.) McCardle had contempt for ‘shock jocks’: Ben Fordham, Ray Hadley, Alan Jones and other ‘dead shits’. Ellis also vilified the media, especially the acclaimed Fairfax crime reporter Kate McClymont (‘the world’s worst snoop’). But his sepulchral disgust was mainly directed at Liberal MPs, not only Abbott and Pyne but also the ‘Morrisons, Bernardis, Campbell Newmans, Mirabellas and Bronwyn Bishops’. His word for them is ‘hydophobic’. But they will all be ‘washed out of the fish wrappings of history’ in the coming Labor landslide of 19 October (Ellis’s tip for election day). This evoked the biggest cheer of the night. But it was a sobering occasion for the Thomson loyalists. There was little to worry Karen McNamara, the respected Liberal candidate in the electorate of Dobell.

Michael Sexton knows a thing or two about literary festivals. As well as being Solicitor-General of NSW, literary critic and novelist, he put in a decade on the board of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. One of his principal memories of this experience is the uniformity of opinion and the absence of real debate at festivals. This is not only characteristic of literary festivals, he says; it is also characteristic of Australian intellectual and cultural life in general. At the Sydney Institute last week, he instanced the reaction to his own public criticism of legislation criminalising the expression of offensive opinions. Many people, including several respected lawyers (Jim Spigelman, formerly Chief Justice, Ian Callinan, formerly of the High Court) have also spoken out, but the supporters and authors of the legislation remain silent. They will not debate the matter. Silence on such an important issue would be unthinkable in the US or UK.

To further illustrate this fear of public debate, Alice Grundy, founding co-editor of the literary magazine Seizure, noted that the crowd at the recent SWF booed and hissed Malcolm Turnbull when he spoke about refugees. They refused to listen to him — until his fellow panellist, the journalist Annabel Crabb, intervened to demand he be allowed to finish his point. They obeyed her, but if this is how a Sydney Festival crowd responded to a small-l liberal, what would it have done, Grundy asked, to a larger-L Liberal? Yet in 2012 the Festival gave David Hicks, the Taleban recruit in Afghanistan, a standing ovation! A pity no one turned up at the Sydney Institute to defend the Festival’s ‘No Debate’ policy. Is this arrogance or cowardice? The current and former artistic directors had been invited, but were ‘unavailable’.

The writers or selectors (Katie Pollock and Paul Daley) had the good idea of making a sort of play — The Hansard Monologues — out of verbatim excerpts from Hansard records of debates in the 43rd parliament on issues ranging from Afghanistan to people smugglers. No surprise that, despite an occasional concession, the result boiled down to propaganda in the Labor interest. The audience guffawed loudly at Ron Boswell and Cory Bernardi for their condemnation of same-sex marriage. (‘If two women can marry, who will take the boys fishing?’ asked the anguished Boswell.) There were no laughs at Wayne Swan and his ever disappearing budget surplus. The audience giggled continually at Christopher Pyne’s supposedly posh accents, but Julia Gillard’s abrasive voice was transmuted into dulcet tones. The loudest applause was for Gillard’s misogyny speech in defence of Speaker Slipper’s misogynistic emails. There was no extract from Tony Abbott’s generous tribute to Gillard’s father and daughter. Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor were the only non-Labor MPs to be applauded. (Malcolm Turnbull won a tick of approval for his defence of gay marriage.) After each of the three performances at the Seymour Centre, the cast discussed the play with well known political figures — one night with David Borger, Minister for Roads in the Keneally government; another night with Professor Geoff Gallop, former Labor premier of West Australia and now chairman of the Australian Republican Movement; and on the third night with, yes, Rob Oakeshott! No Coalition voice was heard. The critics approved.