James Campbell: Late senator Kimberley Kitching was a Labor warrior taken too soon
Canberra would be a much better place if there were more people there like Kimberley Kitching. While she made an impact, the same can’t be said about a lot of other politicians, James Campbell writes.
Opinion
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You would imagine as MPs read the tributes and obituaries that poured out to their colleague Kimberley Kitching since her sudden death on Thursday, that a few of them will have wondered uncomfortably, what the world would say about their contribution to our national life if they were to be taken from us suddenly.
Because there is no denying that in the five-and-a-half years she was there, for an opposition Senate backbencher, Kimberley Kitching made an impact out of all proportion.
I should state at the outset that I am biased; Kimberley had been a friend for several years before she finally made it to Canberra in 2016.
To those of who had hoped she would make it, her sudden arrival there as a replacement for Stephen Conroy seemed like a miracle as three times factional bosses had passed her over for, well never mind, you can look them up.
I remember at the time plenty of Labor people in Canberra viewed her arrival with trepidation. She and her husband Andrew Landeryou had played politics hard over the years, though it was obviously unfair to hold her responsible for his news website which had relentlessly – and often hilariously – mocked their enemies.
The Liberals too weren’t sure what to expect either – most of their knowledge of her came from the Heydon Royal Commission which had made adverse findings against her.
They quickly realised that she was no trade union hack, but an extremely clever operator who took people as she found them, that is to say if you were her friend there was no one better to have in your corner, but if you did the wrong thing by her, well look out.
The Liberals also quickly discovered something else about Kimberley, she was a proper Labor right winger of a species that is almost extinct.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t a faction called the Labor Right, but if you spend much time in the company of most of its members you quickly realise that the views of many of them are on most important questions indistinguishable from their Left colleagues.
Take foreign policy, an area in which the government is currently trying to make hay in the weeks left until we go to the polls.
On the face of it there is little to separate the views of Labor’s current leadership and the Coalition: both support the American alliance; both support standing up to China in its current attempt to punish us for having the temerity to call out its government for, among other
things, its attempts to interfere in our politics.
But on a deeper level, there are profound differences between the views between the Labor Left and sadly, some of its Right, and the Coalition on China.
Under the surface most of these people adhere to what might be called the Hugh White-Paul Keating doctrine, which can be summed as the view that China’s sun is rising as America’s sets and that eventually Australia will have to trim its sails accordingly.
The Left of the ALP are quite comfortable with this because they’ve never really liked American power as are some on their Right, either for venal reasons which don’t bear thinking about, or because, like Keating, they’re jazzed by governments run by men in uniform.
Kimberley wasn’t like that. Like the Right wing Labor people of yore, she didn’t just think that US was a better bet as the devil-you-know but admired it and regarded it a force for good in the world.
She also thought that people who were struggling to be free ought to be supported, or as she put it in the last text she sent me in some argument we were having: “I think there ought to be more countries in the world in the democracy column.”
Liberals sometimes mistook her bolshiness on foreign policy as a sign that she was really one of them; many a time I have had one of them say how great she would have been.
But although she could appear on Sky News and say things that got Liberal voters nodding – a skill too many of Labor people lack – she wasn’t a conservative.
For a start unlike just about everyone in the Liberal Party, she believed in trade unions.
It’s a sad reflection that just because she also believed in a muscular internationalism that the modern Left finds almost impossible to do more than pay half-hearted lip service to, this was mistaken for conservatism.
No doubt her outspokenness on this subject got up the noses of a lot people in Canberra who already resented her for her insistence on doing everything she could to make her mark, that is to say her refusal to sit quietly and to wait her turn.
Whether they would have dumped her from the Victorian senate ticket as they were threatening to do, is something we will never know.
What we can say is Canberra would be a much better place if there were more people there like Kimberley Kitching.