It feels more than uncomfortable to be writing a column about a woman who died suddenly just over a week ago at the age of 52.
Uncomfortable because the Labor senator Kimberley Kitching is no longer here to exercise the judgments that inevitably shape how, when and on what terms her story is told. Other players featuring in the reported cameos of Kitching’s last months in public life also feel constrained in how they respond, either out of self-preservation, or because contesting the recollections and confidences of a recently deceased woman feels unseemly.
But Kitching’s allies and many friends are mourning with the visceral grief that accompanies a sudden and terrible loss – and they are talking.
Anthony Albanese has spent a chunk of this past week trying to nudge Labor past the controversy. But Kitching’s supporters have made it clear to colleagues they don’t appreciate others mandating ground rules for how and when the late senator’s life should be discussed. There has been internal umbrage about policing the terms of the discussion.
The tussle over Kitching’s story, and who can assert the right to tell it, speaks to the corrosive impact of power plays, second guessing and mistrust in professional politics.
If you’ve imbibed the dominant media narrative of the week, you’ll have read that Kitching was allegedly bullied and ostracised in the months leading up to her death by the “mean girls” of Labor’s Senate leadership team: Penny Wong, Kristina Keneally and Katy Gallagher. On Friday, the three issued a joint statement flatly denying that bullying had occurred.
If you are reading some of the coverage on the fly, you might gain an impression that Kitching was helpless in the face of arbitrary bitchy hostility – something of a victim.
I wasn’t a media intimate of the late Victorian senator, but this characterisation doesn’t really capture the person. Kitching, in my observation, was formidable. It’s why she was widely respected. Highly intelligent, charming and shrewd, she was a power player in every sense of that word – an experienced factional operator and a consummate networker, entirely fluent in the blood sport of Victorian Labor politics. To imply otherwise is a disservice to truth. It robs Kitching of agency, and reduces a talented and complex woman to the role of untethered ghost in a history war.
But people are complicated and contradictory creatures. Like any human, she could also be vulnerable, and Kitching’s friends and allies insist she was isolated and ostracised by some of her Labor colleagues – a trend that intensified in the months before her untimely death. She raised this with a number of people.
Some of the underlying friction, I suspect, was caused by basic philosophical differences. Kitching was, by disposition, a cold war Catholic, an anti-communist hawk. Once upon a time, the Labor party used to brim with cold war Catholics, but these days most of them have migrated to the Liberal party. The centre of gravity in modern Labor is post-material progressive, not conservative.
Some of Kitching’s political and policy instincts – and she was ambitious and self-confident enough to pursue them whether that was convenient for senior people or not – went against the grain. In the way of politics, some internal battles were overt, some subterranean.
Then there was her modus operandi. Kitching maintained a substantial personal network outside her own tribe. She cultivated friendships with political opponents, and pursued relationships with commentators and journalists on her own terms. Kitching roamed regularly and widely outside the chain of command, gathering and sharing information. The substantial footprint of her extensive network can be measured in the tone and scale of eulogising after her death, and in some of the media narratives of this past week.
Cultivating personal networks is hardly a crime against the Labor party. It’s smart and entirely proper for politicians to build the coalitions they need to advance the greater good, or to further their own career interests. Everyone in politics does this to a greater or lesser extent.
But given Canberra has become more hierarchal, pugilistic and tribal over the 20-plus years I’ve been ringside, Kitching’s independence generated suspicion from some colleagues. There were significant trust issues, and they triggered periodic confrontations that Kitching doubtless found very bruising.
We also need to surface another largely undeclared dynamic lurking behind this story. Persisting with hierarchies and tribes, the alleged “mean girls” – Wong, Keneally and Gallagher – are all close to each other, and to Anthony Albanese.
Kitching’s most significant and enduring relationship in public life was with the former Labor leader Bill Shorten, a mate who brought her into parliament in 2016. Shorten waited with her husband, Andrew Landeryou, after Kitching died in her car last Friday. The thought of that vigil is gut wrenchingly sad.
It’s fair to say Albanese and Shorten are not close, and in the piranha pen of politics, behaviours of principals and surrogates are always parsed to the nth degree. Politics is inherently a high-conflict, low-trust environment, and non-conforming behaviour is routinely interpreted as provocative proxy warring, whether it is or not.
Often these interpretations are correct, because politics is studded with corrosively ambitious people playing constant three-dimensional chess. These people also know each other’s habits intimately, because most of them have been jousting and jockeying among themselves since they were adolescents. But sometimes the paranoia that builds up in the Canberra cloisters colours interpretation. In these cases, innocent forays are assigned greater meaning.
In any case, Kitching’s death, and the roiling around it, has exposed a rupture that persists in Labor after the trauma of losing the so-called unlosable 2019 election. What the past 10 years tells us is Australia’s major parties lack the collective emotional intelligence, the quality of mercy or, frankly, the rudimentary human resources capability, to deal cathartically and productively with the fallout of leadership transitions, whether they are managed or regicidal. Given these transitions now happen at pace, this presents a significant problem.
One last relevant factor is Kitching’s preselection. Anxiety about that was supercharging some of the tensions.
At the moment, the national executive is calling the shots with Victorian preselections, because a branch-stacking scandal precipitated a federal intervention in the branch. Because the left faction has the numbers on the national executive, Kitching was rendered vulnerable in the event frenemies in the right suddenly decided she was surplus to requirements and someone else was owed a prize. Kitching’s right faction in Victoria is also in flux because the scandal triggered a realignment in the power blocs. So there was certainly active speculation around about her future.
The sum of these parts lead inexorably to this conclusion: Kitching was under significant professional stress at the time of her passing. Now stress tends to go with the territory in politics. People experience it themselves, and they inflict it on others. But Kitching’s personal triggers – feeling isolated in Canberra, and deprived of the comfort of a stable power base in Melbourne – overlapped and intersected.
On the flipside of this terribly sad human story are Kitching’s colleagues, another bunch of complicated humans, who reacted to what they regarded as disloyalty and internecine brinkmanship at the expense of the current leadership both in the Senate and the party – with an election in sight that none of these people want to lose.
My point here is simple. Conflicts are always plural. There is never just one perspective, and suffice to say, all of that is one a hell of a brew.
This is fundamentally a story about politics, and the way politics is practised in contemporary times. The story isn’t pretty because the arena can be hostile to humans.
Politics needs a culture correction. The way many politicians conduct themselves – the way power is routinely exercised, through rolling cycles of provocations and punishments, the gaslighting and the reverse gaslighting – would not be tolerated in other professional workplaces.
Brutality – both dished out and returned – is normalised as the “rough and tumble” of politics. People don’t ask themselves often enough whether this culture needs to be the default.
The Jenkins review, triggered by more sad stories than I have strength to tell you about – some that have been told, and some that will never be told – found that power imbalances and misuse of power were primary drivers of a toxic culture, and the media are certainly not blameless here.
For anyone who cares about the health of Australian democracy, that insight about abuses of power in the political ecosystem is the key takeout of the past 12 months, and it should remain front of mind.
If we care about our collective future, we might want to experiment with something a bit more nourishing and soulful and sustainable than “whatever it takes”, and “what goes around, comes around”.
