What is it with the Sydney Writers’ Festival and writers? The festival that purports to celebrate writers and journalists seems awfully good at censoring and excluding them.

According to Artistic Director Wendy Were, “this Festival provides the space for writers and readers from all over the world to gather at a time of social turmoil.” Well, all except UTS journalism students and Crikey‘s Guy Rundle, apparently.

The ongoing shenanigans over some harmless criticism by a few University of Technology Sydney journalism students in their publication Festival News has been well documented by Margaret Simons in Crikey — but the controversy continued this year, with students again prevented from handing out Festival News on site (although they were allowed in and given access to SWF participants for interviews).

Sydney Writers’ Festival Managing Director Ben Strout claims this is merely because Walsh Bay Precinct is “private property” and that therefore it has a right to manage what publications are distributed on that private property.

The enclosed public space of Walsh Bay was apparently also the reason given to Lawrence Gibbons of the Alternative Media Group when he was prevented from distributing copies of his publications, including City News, to the festival site.

“Basically on the Sunday I went down there with bundles of papers to distribute at the wharf and I was stopped by a gentleman who identified himself as the festival’s security manager and said that he had been instructed not to let the papers be distributed on the premises,” Gibbons told me.

“I put my papers down on the floor, and he said if you leave them there I will throw them out, and I said if you throw them out I will take legal action because they are my property.”

The apparent response from the festival’s representative was that Gibbons was “escalating matters” and that if he continued “I will call the police.”

Gibbons has been distributing publications to tenants at the Walsh Bay site for 14 years and was understandably miffed at his treatment — all the more so seeing as City News had written up several articles about the Sydney Writers’ Festival in April in conjunction with UTS students (was that, perhaps, the problem?).

Ben Strout from the Sydney Writers’ Festival has a somewhat different story. He claims that “the publications were dumped on private property without the approval of the Walsh Bay Precinct or the cafe in the area,” and that furthermore, “Lawrence was aggressive and abusive to Sydney Writers’ Festival staff.”

When asked why Guy Rundle was evicted from a session on free speech, Strout told me it was simply because Rundle didn’t ask permission and that “all he needed to do was ask” beforehand.

After this, Crikey spoke to Luke Mead, the General Manager of Walsh Bay Precinct, a very unhappy camper. Mead has been having a hard time with the media; he apparently “yelled down the phone” at the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Elizabeth Farrelly and is now directing all questions to the Walsh Bay Precinct Committee for written response. In our short and terse conversation he denied any knowledge that City News is distributed to Walsh Bay tenants like the Sydney Dance Company. He said he spoke to Lawrence Gibbons on Monday but claimed it was a “private” conversation, declining to comment further.

All in all it’s not a good look for the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Leaving aside the thorny issues of the increasingly privatised and apparently now privately-censored nature of Walsh Bay — a precinct which is at least nominally open to the public and contains several taxpayer-funded arts organisations and public events — the bigger question is: why?

What’s the point of policing free publications at a Writers Festival? And why risk negative attention when the Festival had, as Strout himself told me with unwitting irony, “a wide range of sell-out events”?