Piers Akerman: ALP leaders need to act on the party’s culture of bullying
Senator Kimberley Kitching left a trove of material which appeared to reveal a cover-up of a putrid culture within the party, Piers Akerman writes.
Opinion
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Kimberley Kitching will be poignantly eulogised during a service in Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral on Monday.
Those who knew and loved her from across the political spectrum will be genuine in their grief.
Others present, from the Labor Party which she represented for six years in the Senate, will attend hoping to associate themselves with her even as they defend themselves against claims of bullying and attempts to destroy Kitching politically.
Call it fate, call it karma, but Kitching left a trove of material which is nothing short of an indictment of a raft of senior powerbrokers in the ALP – a number of them women, but not excluding Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese – revealing what appeared to be a cover-up of a putrid culture within the party.
Those who persecuted and effectively cancelled her within the ALP did so for a variety of reasons but factionalism ranked high, as did jealousy so it seems.
Kitching referred to the women who she believed had ostracised her – senators Penny Wong, Kristina Keneally and Katy Gallagher – as the “mean girls”.
Mean Girls was the title of a 2004 teenage cult film about high school social cliques.
The three senators have issued a statement in which they said the claims of bullying were untrue, and other assertions were similarly inaccurate.
In Australia we have tragically seen teenagers suicide after high school bullying and we have seen workplaces turned over because of it.
Kitching presented evidence to senior ALP colleagues, including deputy Labor leader Richard Marles, that she felt her life was being destroyed by others despite her outstanding work on numerous committees.
She won global acclaim after negotiating bipartisan agreement on the Magnitsky Act, which Wong, Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, belatedly backed nearly two years after Kitching began her crusade to punish foreign human rights abusers.
The ALP wouldn’t pay for her ticket to attend an award ceremony in London honouring her work. She funded the trip herself.
There are broad principles which decent humans support regardless of their politics but Kitching was regarded with suspicion by powerful people within the ALP because of
her courageous attacks on human rights abuses regardless of which nation was to blame.
Albanese was aware of the bullying claims but it seems, like Marles, was either not concerned enough to act or unaware of the extent of the damage the stress was causing this Labor star. He should have been both concerned and on top of the issue because he is the leader of the party.
Instead he attacked the use of the term “mean girls” claiming it dishonours the memory of a woman who just died and he has rejected any form of inquiry into the culture of the Labor Party.
Labor has long claimed that conservatives and in particular Prime Minister Scott Morrison have a “woman problem”. This allegation was also fired at former PM Tony Abbott, whose chief-of-staff Peta Credlin repeatedly proved the opposite.
The ALP weaponised the false claim and used it against former attorney-general Christian Porter and former education minister Alan Tudge, causing both men to resign their positions after chorusing unproven allegations.
Albanese did nothing to rein in his colleagues, instead he ensured that he was seen supporting Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins in their campaigns against the Coalition.
When 52-year-old Kitching died, friends from both sides of politics shared the belief that the stress she suffered as a result of the persecution, isolation, ostracisation and exclusion was a contributing factor.
Albanese, who was party to her being dumped from Labor’s tactics committee meetings and snubbed and blocked her from asking regular questions during Question Time, should consider his role in the events that led up to her untimely death at Monday’s funeral.
Has he the courage to admit his own failure to address the very obvious problem that lies like a cancer within the federal Labor Party?
As Kitching lies before him in her coffin will he just stand mute and impotent beside others who knew of Kitching’s clear distress but did nothing?
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