Peta Credlin: Kimberley Kitching suffered at the hands of Labor’s left faction

The hostility and nastiness directed towards Kimberley Kitching is a window into how shallow and vindictive our public life has become and would get worse under Labor, writes Peta Credlin.

The treatment of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching before her early death matters because it reveals the likely nature of any future Albanese government.

The “mean girls” accused of ganging up on Kitching because she dared to think differently will all be senior Cabinet ministers in a matter of weeks if Labor wins the looming election.

Is that what we really want: a potential PM who rails against the Liberal Party’s “problem with women” but ignores his own; and ministers who say that women must “have each other’s backs” while ostracising one of their own?

At one level, the treatment of Kitching – the hostility and the nastiness that her close friends, like former Labor Leader Bill Shorten and union leader Diana Asmar say added to her stress and made her a “physical wreck” – is gossip from the Canberra bubble. At another level, it’s a window into how shallow and vindictive our public life has become and a sign that this would only get worse under Labor.

The problem for Anthony Albanese is that while Kitching can no longer speak for herself, her friends are speaking for her.

Senator Kimberley Kitching with Attila the dog while visiting Defence personnel in Afghanistan. picture: supplied

And his claims that calling out the alleged bullying she suffered and using the term “mean girls” is somehow “disrespectful” to the three senators accused of mistreating her just makes him look gutless and weak.

After all, Senators Penny Wong, Katy Gallagher and Kristina Keneally have all loudly demanded that others treat women better than it seems they have treated their own colleague. It was only two years ago at a breakfast in Adelaide for International Women’s Day that Wong lectured the room, saying that “so much of our work as feminists is dedicated to supporting and enabling other women …. whether it’s in the public square or on social media, we need to have each other’s back”.

Supporting women?

Having each other’s back?

Back in 2019, the ABC reported that a Labor colleague had needled Kitching in a senate tactics meeting that she didn’t understand the issue of schoolchildren protesting over climate change because she was childless. As a woman who wanted children but couldn’t have them – like Kitching – I can’t think of a more wounding insult.

Thanks to Sharri Markson’s outstanding reporting, Penny Wong was named as the woman who belittled Kitching’s infertility, with Wong forced into a humiliating admission on Thursday that yes, it was her and she now deeply regretted what she said.

By Friday, after earlier refusing to make any media comment on these horrific allegations, Keneally joined with Gallagher and Wong to issue a statement disputing the claims of systematic bullying and intimidation, and confirming that all three would attend her funeral in Melbourne on Monday.

Peta Credlin says Kimberley Kitching is owed justice.

Saturday’s heartbreaking tribute from national secretary of the Health Workers’ Union Diana Asmar, who held her hand as she was dying, shows her friends will not accept Albanese’s refusal to deliver Kitching some justice.

This tragic but instructive episode exposes the hypocrisy of the left against the right and of Labor versus Liberal. If Kitching had been a woman of the Labor left, as Wong is, as Katy Gallagher is, and as Kristina Keneally is – in ideology if not in formal affiliation – there’s no doubt that she’d have been a protected species. Instead Kitching was one of that disappearing breed, a Labor right-winger in the Hawke tradition, a supporter of the US alliance and of sensible economics.

As Kitching’s friend, the long-serving former Labor MP, Michael Danby said, “the left wing of the Labor Party is too strong … and the reason (Kitching) was difficult was because she represented the mainstream, the Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Kim Beazley point of view, which is now not in the ascendancy in Labor”.

So not only have these sad events exposed the opposition leader’s double standards, they’ve also revealed the hollowness of his aspirations to be a leader in the mould of Labor’s longest serving PM, “Mr Consensus”, Bob Hawke.

Anthony Albanese is anything but a Labor leader in the image of Bob Hawke, writes Peta Credlin.

Not only does Albanese lack Hawke’s instinct for pro-business reform but his inability to deal with this trouble in his own ranks is a serious failure of leadership.

This terrible tragedy has also exploded the notion that just having more women in parliament, via a quota system, is the guarantee of a nicer, gentler public life – because Wong, Gallagher and Keneally have shown themselves to be anything but.

Ask the former Victorian Labor minister, Jane Garrett; the now ex-Labor Victorian MLC Kaushaliya Vaghela; or the former NSW federal Labor MP Emma Husar how they’ve fared at the hands of their Labor colleagues, female as well as male.  

We need better people and stronger characters in the parliament, not just more female chromosomes.

And Kimberley Kitching is owed justice. Those who want high office should have the guts to own up to what they did.

If Anthony Albanese can’t even stand up to his own party, what kind of a PM would he really make?

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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Kimberley Kitching suffered at the hands of Labor’s left faction