Unravelling the myth of new Labor senator Kimberley Kitching

Bill Shorten is a key supporter of new senator Kimberley Kitching.

There was a buoyant mood on Tuesday evening during a brief joint sitting of the Victorian parliament when Kimberley Kitching was formally appointed to fill the casual Senate vacancy created by the abrupt departure of Labor Right faction chief Stephen ­Conroy. In emailed invitations, Kit­ching asked supporters to join her afterwards for a celebratory drink so she could thank them personally.

“Keep sassy,” she signed off, playfully referring to a recent ­remark by conservative commentator Gerard Henderson on the ABC’s Insiders program. While admitting he did not know her, Henderson praised Kitching as a “pretty sassy sort of person” who would make a fine senator ­because “she’s good on television”.

Behind the levity, Kitching’s ­elevation to the Senate has many in the ALP seething about the judgment of Bill Shorten. No matter how it has been portrayed by Shorten’s side as a democratic process, Kitching was a captain’s pick by Labor’s federal leader.

On the surface, Kitching was endorsed by an overwhelming margin, winning a party ballot by 79 party votes to three. The result suggests she is very popular. She is not. Shorten won the day for Kitching, working the phone to gain key numbers from the Victorian branch of the Transport Workers Union. Shorten had his own powerbase, the Australian Workers’ Union, in the bag. Kit­ching opponents crumbled shortly before the ballot, or abstained.

Four months after the federal election Malcolm Turnbull ­almost lost, public attention has focused mainly on disarray in the Coalition. Shorten seems closer than ever to leading Labor to an election victory next time around.

Angst inside Labor over the promotion of Kitching has ­exposed an internal party war, ­regardless of the Coalition’s woes, that is all about a lack of faith in Shorten. The Kitching appointment brings to the surface serious doubts about Shorten’s leadership. It reveals Labor as a badly fractured party. Disenchantment has been building for some time, perverse though it might seem after Labor’s better-than-expected election result with Shorten in charge. The internal dynamic is one of distrust and loathing dir­ected mainly at him.

While Shorten is very conscious that he needs to guard his back, there is no manoeuvring to oust him. Shorten is safe for now. But he is regarded as an interim leader unlikely to win the next election, and there is backroom talk at senior ALP levels of future leadership teams including combinations of Anthony Albanese, Chris Bowen, Tanya Plibersek and Tony Burke from NSW.

The reality inside Labor is that Albanese is the only one with the numbers to oust Shorten — but Albanese has a personal credo of not tearing down leaders. Shorten is a longtime friend of Kitching. His close friendly association with her husband, former bankrupt and blogger Andrew Landeryou, stretches back even longer.

While friendship should be no impediment, bad political baggage is a legitimate consideration. ­Unfor­tunately Kitching has a trailer load of it. Little else can ­explain why a coterie of her supporters have gone out of their way to perpetuate ridiculous myths about her roles in cleaning up corruption inside the troubled Health Services Union and helping to ­restore the financial position of one of its branches. Both claims are nonsense — the facts show she did neither. What particularly bothers Labor MPs and some union leaders is how Kitching’s entry to the Senate frontline is set to bring back all the HSU’s dirty washing into parliamentary ­debate, highlighting bad union ­behaviour just when Labor wanted it forgotten.

Cabinet secretary Arthur Sinodinos has already signalled the Coalition’s intention to target Kitching when she lands in Canberra. It is all very well for Kitching’s backers to dismiss Sinodinos as partisan — but Kitching is a gift for the Turnbull government.

Kitching, a lawyer and former Melbourne city councillor, was appointed general manager of the HSU No 1 branch after a Shorten-backed candidate, Diana Asmar, was elected its branch secretary in late 2012. Kitching was essentially a plant: Asmar was a novice union leader, a figurehead who needed help.

Related to her brief stint as HSU No 1 branch general manager, Kitching still faces an unresolved recommendation for possible criminal charges arising from the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption. In his interim report, royal commissioner Dyson Heydon said the federal Director of Public Prosecutions should consider whether Kitching should be prosecuted for “aiding and abetting” after allegedly unlawfully doing the workplace right-of-entry tests of six HSU No 1 branch officials, including Asmar’s. Securing permits to enter workplaces is essential for union officials so they can speak to members and investigate member complaints. Under the criminal code, the offence of knowingly or recklessly giving false information carries a maximum prison term of 12 months.

While nothing has come of the Kitching recommendation so far, and might not, the Fair Work Commission has made a definitive ruling, based on compelling evidence, that Kitching did do the six tests. Commission vice-president Graeme Watson found Kitching was not “truthful or reliable” in her denials of involvement. Watson pointed out — contrary to some who compared the offence with a parking ticket — that “making false declarations” and “failing to complete training that is a requirement” are serious matters that strike at the heart of the system’s integrity.

The evidence against Kitching turned on a close scrutiny of phone records, and the whereabouts of Kitching and others when she did the tests as a job lot. But there was more: corroborating evidence from several HSU No 1 branch staff who worked in the ­office with Kitching, and from Craig McGregor, Asmar’s equivalent as secretary of the HSU No 3 branch. Kitching apparently boasted about doing the tests, and getting 100 per cent.

Kitching had left the HSU by the time of Watson’s ruling in June last year, having joined a small legal firm, Cornwall Stodart, which has served as a handy buffer between the HSU and the Senate. Watson’s penalty was to revoke Asmar’s right of entry permit. The HSU No 1 branch is now in the ­absurd situation that its leader cannot enter workplaces.

For the Coalition, Kitching is living proof of why new laws are necessary to regulate the behaviour of irresponsible union officials. It wants to pass legislation in the pipeline to create a registered organisations commission that would enforce tough accountability akin to the rules for company directors. Penalties for breaches would be harsh. Sinodinis and others are set to press this case.

Meanwhile, the suggestion that the HSU No 1 branch finances were cleaned up on Kitching’s watch is pure fantasy. It is true that Asmar and Kitching inherited a mess from an underling of the now disgraced Kathy Jackson — but the HSU No 1 branch did not recover during Kitching’s time there. Indeed, it went backwards, lapsing further into debt. The branch’s financial reports do not lie. Asmar, with Kitching as general manager, ran up an extraordinary $1.13 million in legal bills in one year, and spent beyond the union’s means. Consideration was given, at a national level of the ­reformed HSU, to dissolving the branch. Only the sale of the union’s $7m building with some proceeds used to pay debt, plus a round of pay cuts, staff redundancies and a stringent financial plan — imposed from above after Kitching’s exit — kept the branch afloat. In February this year, the regulatory compliance branch of the Fair Work Commission warned Asmar in writing that it had “concerns about the ongoing solvency” of HSU branch No 1.

Even now, despite posting a $451,000 surplus for the 2015-16 ­financial year following a series of deficits, the equity position of the HSU No 1 branch is weak compared with the past. The branch bought a cheaper $1.1m building outright in 2014. Months later its equity position was $878,793 — or less than the value of the building. The branch’s equity position is now $1.3m. That is an improvement, but considerably less than the real equity position of about $4.6m when Asmar and Kitching took over.

Kitching’s supporters argue that she should be not be judged by the actions of her controversial husband, Landeryou. It is a valid point. But it is also widely known that the couple operate as a unit in Victorian Labor politics. In many ways they are indivisible. Like Landeryou, Kitching is a former bankrupt after the couple’s ­involvement in a failed online gaming business, and Solomon Lew’s attempts to claw back a $3m debt. Kitching’s bankruptcy was annulled early with debts settled after she sold the couple’s $1.8m Melbourne mansion, while Landeryou served out a full three years.

Landeryou shut down his Vexnews blog, which often ran scathing, defamatory material about factional opponents that Kitching has never distanced herself from, around the time Shorten became Opposition Leader and Kitching joined the HSU No 1 branch. The linkages were getting too close. But Landeryou was still never far from Kitching. He campaigned for the Shorten-backed Asmar team in 2012 and has taken an active ­interest in HSU affairs since. Kitching and Landeryou’s ­involvement with the HSU No 1 branch has essentially been a ­rerun of powerplays involving Kathy Jackson and her former husband Jeff when they ran two of the HSU Victorian branches, numbers 3 and 1 respectively, from the late 1990s to 2010. The Kitching-Landeryou infiltration has been yet again all about giving factional numbers to Shorten so he can prop up his dominance of the Victorian ALP Right.

The HSU No 1 Branch is now not an ALP affiliate after getting dumped during the long-running HSU corruption scandal but it will be again next month. The branch’s numbers will be handed to Shorten’s faction on a plate. Above and beyond all this politicking on Planet Kitching are tall tales alleging that she was instrumental in exposing corruption by Jackson. The myth was advanced only this week by Michael Danby, the Labor MP for Melbourne Ports and a Kitching-Landeryou ally. Interviewed on the ABC’s Lateline, Danby made the extraordinary claim that Kitching found all the important evidence of Jackson’s corruption when she and Asmar arrived at HSU No 1 headquarters and found rubbish bags full of shredded paper. Heroically, Kitching spent hours sticky-taping the shreds back together “like the movie Argo”. It was, Danby claimed, material that the royal commission did not want to see, when Jackson was still hailed as a goodie.

“It was all the material on Kathy Jackson’s (alleged) malfeasance — the corruption of the union,” Danby said. This narrative has been echoed in one radio ­interview by former ALP heavyweight Graham Richardson, normally well briefed in his present role as a political commentator, but on this occasion sold a pup by someone. Referring to Kitching, Richardson said: “I’m grateful to her because she was one of the ones who provided a lot of the ­information that was used to force the royal commission into having a crack at Kathy Jackson.”

Unfortunately, Danby and Richardson are wrong. Kitching did spend hours taping bits of paper together — but almost all of it came from the No 1 branch where she worked, not Jackson’s No 3 branch. None of the material prompted the royal commission to start investigating Jackson. Kitching handed some of the ­material to Chris Brown, the HSU’s national secretary. He found it useless, using none of it for a successful $1.4m damages case against Jackson, nor in gathering evidence for police.

The people who worked hard in exposing the alleged corruption of Jackson were Craig McGregor and Rosemary Kelly, the media-shy head of the HSU’s No 4 branch. Brown worked tirelessly with lawyers in mounting a case against Jackson. When Inquirer spoke with Danby yesterday, he said he’d been told differently. He thought Kitching helped expose a secret deal Jackson negotiated to secure a $250,000 payment to her branch from Melbourne’s Peter MacCallum cancer hospital. Wrong again.

“All I can say is what I was told about the documents they put ­together,” Danby said. Initially Danby said he could not remember who told him about Kitching’s whistleblower role — but the memory came back. “It was Asmar, obviously Kitching, and people who worked at the HSU.” There’s nothing like self-promotion.