Piers Akerman: Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching was a brave crusader

Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching will be remembered as a courageous foreign policy fighter who was not afraid to call out the world’s most powerful countries, Piers Akerman writes.

Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching’s sudden death at a time it appears the West has blinked in the face of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine tragically reminds us of the weakness of the world’s liberal democracies.

Kitching, a Victorian senator, was a ferocious fighter for freedom and will be remembered for ensuring Australia adopted Magnitsky-style laws late last year sanctioning foreign officials engaged in murdering their own citizens and otherwise crushing civil liberties.

Most recently she was in the headlines for using parliamentary privilege to name China as the alleged “puppeteer” behind a foreign interference plot foiled by ASIO.

She was a courageous foreign policy fighter and prepared to call out China when party leader Anthony Albanese and shadow foreign policy spokesman Penny Wong resorted to weasel words suggesting Australia should be more conciliatory to the aggressor despite the outrageous list of demands it had presented.

An unabashed foreign policy hawk, she was a founding member of the informal parliamentary cross-party grouping of China hawks known as the “Wolverines”, established in 2017, which pushed for a harder line against China.

Senator Kimberley Kitching with Attila the dog while visiting Defence personnel in Afghanistan. Picture: Supplied

With Liberal senator James Paterson, Kitching was the Australian co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group of legislators from around the world who have called for democratic countries to rethink the way they engage with China and for democracies to mount “a common defence of shared principles” and to stand up for human rights in relationships with China.

Because of her no-nonsense foreign policy positions she was targeted by the Left faction in the Victorian ALP, the bloc which supports Premier Dan Andrews. The Left wanted to push the feisty 52-year-old into an unwinnable position on Labor’s senate ticket because she didn’t subscribe to its lunatic policies of appeasement, fighting for freedom and liberty
from tyranny.

The Left particularly hated her stance on Israel because she was not afraid to call out the lies of the pro-terrorist sham Palestinian Authority government.

This I know because we met through our membership of the International Institute for Strategic Leadership Dialogue, formerly the Australia Israel UK Leadership Dialogue, and attended its conferences in the Middle East before Covid shut down international travel and forced participants to resort to virtual conferencing.

After one meeting with PA officials, she was most incensed by the outright lies they’d told her, in particular the laughable claim that the PA was not teaching children to hate Jews and promote terrorism.

More recently, she issued a joint statement with Liberal senator Eric Abetz rejecting Amnesty International’s “attempts to equate Israel’s efforts to the abhorrent historical practice of apartheid in South Africa”.

Senator Kitching was not afraid to call out China, Piers Akerman says. Picture: Steph Chambers/Getty

Businessman Bill Browder, whose tax adviser Sergei Magnitsky was tortured and murdered by Putin’s men, led global tributes to Senator Kitching Thursday night.

“Losing Kimberley is a terrible tragedy for her family, her friends, Australia and the world,” he said.

“Kimberley was a brave justice warrior who never stood down or was intimidated by the evil regimes she advocated against.”

Unlike the leaders of Germany, who two weeks ago decided to reopen their nuclear power plants and resume coal mining to reduce reliance on Russian gas but who have now decided to buckle to the Greens and remain enslaved to the Putin regime.

The world applauded Chancellor Olaf Scholz then but is now silent as the nation scraps its plans to shut down its remaining nuclear power plants and keep Russian gas flowing.

Scholz leads the Social Democratic Party which is in coalition with the Greens. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, the leader of the Greens, announced the roll-back of Germany’s grand plan to cut off Russian energy.

This is precisely the sort of craven kowtowing to international bullies that Kitching spent her time in office exposing and fighting.

Australian woman Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was detained in Iran, said Kitching’s human rights work set her apart from other politicians.

“Unlike many politicians, Kitching made a very real contribution to something bigger than herself,” Ms Moore-Gilbert said.