Andrew Bolt: Kimberley Kitching and her strong leadership against China will be sorely missed

The late Kimberley Kitching was an intelligent woman who bravely stood up against China’s dictatorship, even if it caused waves in her own party.

NO, I won’t blame some in Labor for killing my friend Kimberley Kitching last week. My anger with them is different.

My anger comes from what Kimberley and I talked about over lunch at my home on the Friday before she died in the street of a suspected heart attack, aged just 52.

Of course, I perfectly understand why other friends, like former Labor leader Bill Shorten, are pointing the finger in their grief.

At our lunch, Kimberley was as always fun – animated and insightful. She was an old-style Labor politician of high principle, admired around the democratic world for her fight for people threatened by tyrants and terrorists, including China’s Uyghurs and Tibetans, the Taiwanese and the democrats of Hong Kong, Russia’s anti-Putin dissidents, Israelis and now the Ukrainians.

A Catholic steeped in Western culture – she’d gone to school in France and spoke French beautifully – she knew the uncompromising difference between tyranny and freedom.

Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching tragically died aged 52.

But this time Kimberley was also upset by Labor threats to cut short her glittering parliamentary career by stripping her of preselection for her Senate seat, after less than six years.

Even so, it would be unfair to blame these Labor thugs for killing her. There can be no politics in a democracy without stress.

Instead, I remember one of the very last things she said to me.

I asked: “Do you really think Labor would be as tough as the Liberals on China?”

“God, no,” erupted Kimberley.

I never reveal private conversations with the living, but Kimberley is dead and I need to explain why her death matters very much to us all. I hope that in doing so, she may even in death help drag Labor back to sense.

The fact is Kimberley’s Labor enemies were often furious with her for standing up to China’s dictatorship, and without their permission.

Two weeks ago, the Guardian Australia ran a well-briefed story saying Kitching could be dumped by Labor, citing this alleged sin: “Kitching … recently antagonised colleagues after she used parliamentary privilege to name the Chinese billionaire Chau Chak Wing as ‘the puppeteer mentioned’ in ASIO boss Mike Burgess’s case study of an alleged foreign interference plot.”

You might remember Kimberley naming Chau as the puppeteer that our top spy agency privately believed used Chinese money to try to get Labor election candidates who’d support the Chinese dictatorship. (Chau denies this.)

Kitching faced backlash for speaking out against China.

Kimberley rightly believed it was in the national interest to name him, but Labor heavies were furious. They thought that would help the Liberals. They put Labor’s interests above the nation’s.

Labor tribalists like Senate Opposition leader Penny Wong and deputy leader Kristina Keneally simply couldn’t stand her.

They’ve long treated Kimberley with suspicion, especially after she joined Liberal MPs like Andrew Hastie and James Paterson to form the “Wolverines” – a parliamentary group calling out Chinese aggression against Australia.

Keneally warned another Labor MP against having a Wolverines sticker on his door, and Kimberley laughingly told me about an hour-long phone call from Wong that she described as abusive.

And she spoke, not laughing this time, of other moves to shut her down.

Albanese last year dumped her as shadow assistant minister for government accountability. She was then banned from Labor’s Senate tactics committee.

Albanese’s media office even dropped her off their email distribution list for the media lines of the day. She was banned from asking questions in parliament.

This was Labor bullying a free-speaking woman of great talent and intelligence, while promoting a polarising party hack like Kenneally.

This was Labor despising a charming woman who could talk to people of all sides of politics – even One Nation leader Pauline Hanson cried in paying tribute to her – while falling in behind cold Wong, who talks only to Labor’s own.

In fact, on the day of her death, Albanese proved Kimberley right about modern Labor’s triviality in the fight for freedom.

With Russia invading Ukraine in what seems the start of World War Three, Albanese announced: “On coming to government, I will ask the Director General of National Intelligence and the Secretary of the Defence Department to undertake a risk assessment of the implications of climate change for national security.”

Seriously? A review by our military and spy chiefs of the wildly exaggerated threat of climate change? Not of Russia? China? Not of our weaponry, or theirs?

God, Kimberley, you’ll be missed, and not just by the many friends who loved you. You’d have resisted such foolishness. You’d have fought for this country.