The true story of Kimberley Kitching and the Labor gang

Scott Morrison and his government are running ten points behind on Newspoll and the Libs have just taken a shellacking in South Australia. They probably won’t win in May. Should they somehow do so, one major reason why would be the front page of Saturday’s Tele and Herald Sun — where Health Workers Union secretary Diana Asmar, Kimberley Kitching’s friend and factional mate, unloads on Anthony Albanese in the strongest terms to date, claiming Kitching was a “nervous wreck” at the sight of Penny Wong and others, all but claiming she was a dead woman walking.

As Kitching’s funeral starts this afternoon — at St Patrick’s Cathedral, a privately arranged affair to look like a state occasion — we can reflect on just how far the people around her are willing to go in their war against their own party, weeks out from a federal election. 

Make no mistake about it. If somehow Morrison can use this to his advantage and win — and it’s one of the few things he’s got at the moment — then what Bill Shorten and his shrunken sub-faction are doing now will rank as one of the greatest betrayals of the Australian Labor Party in its one hundred and thirty year history. In a wilful connivance with News Corp and parts of Nine, a group angry at being squeezed from party power is building the conditions for a surprise defeat as we speak.

How are they doing it? The clue is in all these little moments of communication over “bullying” — released to and beat up by a compliant press. Texts over Wong “not wanting to see me again”, telling a workplace trainer she was being bullied, presenting a letter to Richard Marles describing removal from tactics committees as bullying, etc.

All this is old-fashioned internal party lawfare, designed, should it have come to it, to turn the Senate list preselection into a potential party scandal about personal behaviour. That would save her seat and in turn help stop the slide in power of Shorten’s faction “the AWU/Shorts”, a group the party is trying to more or less dissolve altogether. Such internal party lawfare happens all the time these days.

But before the case could be made, Kitching died tragically. However spontaneous the outpourings of grief about “Labor killing her” there may have been at the time, a different strategy went into play. There seems to be no other way to see it rather than as a deliberate (or wilfully negligent) attempt to get some concessions from the party centre for their faction, even at the cost of wrecking the election entirely.

How are they, and News Corp and others, getting away with it? Because the remainder of the media are too supine, cowardly or ignorant to explain to their readers how factional warfare really works. They’re particularly unwilling to talk about what Kitching and her circle were really like.

Effectively this was a group that took control of an entire union, the Health Workers Union — formerly the Health Services Union 1 (HSU1). In the 2000s, the HSU1 was run by Jeff Jackson, while HSU3 was run by his then-wife Kathy Jackson — these were, all at one time, part of Shorten’s faction. When they were all cleared out due to corruption, Diana Asmar — also of Shorten’s faction — took over HSU1 (and changed its name to make it look fully independent, though it remains a branch union). There she appointed Kimberley Kitching to an executive post (without advertising the position), with Kitching’s husband, Andrew Landeryou, in a shadowy, off-the-books role.

As a report by the HSU head office in Sydney would detail in 2016, Asmar and her team then proceeded to take the branch close to functional insolvency, while bragging about how they had turned it around. Kitching and Asmar were accused in the Trade Union Royal Commission (by an office colleague, from another faction, it must be said) of using union cars and taxi vouchers for personal use, of Kitching running a (failed) campaign for preselection to the Labor seat of Gellibrand using union print resources, and of taking payout for leave and the weeks off.

The Commission established that Kitching was sitting “right of entry” exams for their faction’s union reps (because if you choose them by loyalty, they may well be too stupid to handle a basic legal exam), and recommended prosecution, which did not occur.

The Australian reported that the HSU’s own report established that Asmar had made herself the highest paid union official at the time, spent around $100,000 on a freeway billboard campaign featuring her picture and little else about the union, covered the financial hole by selling the union’s building for $7 million, and then claimed they had stopped the fiscal slide — as well as hiring a QC at $4,000 a day (a fairly typical mad thing) to try and reclaim a picture of JFK that Kathy Jackson had bought illegally with union funds, and which HSU3 (now the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association) was now trying to sell to return the money to members.

Meanwhile Kitching burnished her credentials with a complete fantasy tale — inspired by the film Argo? — of gluing together shredded documents to help implicate Jackson — even though Jackson had run a different union, and the commission said the material was “useless”.

Does any of this add up to anything huge? Not bit by bit. It’s the pathetic, squalid daily business of factional campaigning. But when Kitching’s dewy-eyed supporters euphemise her career as “playing hard”, this is what they mean. Look at the entitlement, look at the casual lying.

These are people who take over unions that represent low-paid health care workers, for God’s sake — the people who do the (literally) shitty jobs that keep you alive. They are repaid with union bosses who crush any possibility of rank-and-file candidates getting elected, or even standing — with darker methods than the ones I’m describing here — and then use it as a base for factional and career advancement while madly burning money on obsessive spats and indulgences. The left, liberal, white feminists eulogising Kitching should bear in mind that these health union members are in great numbers, women and men of colour, many recent migrants. 

So when I say that I don’t believe for a second Asmar’s account of Kitching’s “terror” at Wong et al, it’s because her ability to spin a whole story out of not much is well documented. If I don’t believe Kitching’s claim she was being impacted by the factional conflict she was involved in, it’s because there is an established record of her being a strategic liar and of misusing official procedures, and good evidence of personal corruption.

This is all without considering Kitching’s knowledge of her husband’s financial chaos, and his sudden sojourn to Costa Rica — an event which she presented as a complete surprise to her, something no one has ever believed for a second. This must, as they say in court, go to character. Or lack thereof.

This stuff matters. It matters in the assessment of what Kitching had said, what Asmar has said, who’s saying it, and for what reason. Whether people understand the factional politics or not, they understand sharp operators who pretend to be victims and leave a paper trail to turn standard conflict into victimisation, because there’s one of these people in every workplace (yes, as well as the genuinely bullied).

I mean, our non-corrupted commentators should be able to explain that Kitching’s presentation of a seven-page letter to Richard Marles about “bullying” was never expected to yield action, because Marles is the head of the faction trying to take her seat back (they regard it as their own). It was there to jam him up later. He knew, she knew, he knew, etc and so on. 

After all, the whole corrupt branch-stacking adventure of Shorten/the AWU’s ally Adem Somyurek was designed to destroy Marles’s power base. And when that was exposed and the Feds took over the Victorian branch — to cut this group out for once and for all — what was the name of the court case to try and stop it? Asmar (HWU) and others v Albanese. How did they run the argument? By saying that intervention was a sexist attack on proud Labor women. Sound familiar?

The mainstream media’s readers need this information on these arcane worlds to make a decision about the claims they’re hearing. What do they get from Andrew Probyn, Samantha Maiden, Katharine Murphy and Laura Tingle? Nothing except generalities about factional warfare, “not without sin”, and then back to an empathic narrative that is easier to tell, covers their lack of knowledge about where the factions are at, and allows them to suck up to a public who sees the world increasingly in personal terms, and who might find the sudden discussion of actual politics a bit cold and reflecting poorly — in empath terms — on actual political correspondents.

Thus, Tingle alone pointed out that Kitching lost her place on the party’s tactics committee because she leaked to Linda Reynolds that Labor had the info on the Brittany Higgins rape accusation. Kitching claimed she was trying to “depoliticise” it — but she was happy to de facto trade it for political capital with another one of her cross-party, pro-US colleagues.

Having noted that, Tingle then relapses into the bullying narrative, without helping her readership to understand the political infighting it represented, and the point of it. So it relapses into “mean girl” stuff. It’s hopeless. I am not asking these people to push a certain interpretation. No, I’m saying that omission of expert context when presenting to a non-expert audience is not “giving people the facts” as they claim — it’s not giving the full picture, the one it’s your damn job to give.

Your correspondent was hoping someone would write all this up last week. It’s no joy to tell these truths on the day of someone’s funeral. But since the funeral itself has been turned into a public occasion as part of this campaign, it seems necessary. For the past two years, Labor has been trying to uproot this small factional clique (hence the espionage-quality bugging of their ally Somyurek, his exposure and the destruction of his faction). They didn’t get there fast enough. It’s not Labor that has a sickness at its heart; it’s this marginal and desperate crowd that do.

If this gang really help Morrison slide back in, it will be the crowning anti-achievement of their decades of operation, their masterpiece of nihilism and resentment betraying the hard work and hopes of tens and hundreds of thousands of Labor members and supporters that in a fair election we may get a government of simple competence and decency — and not another Rupert Murdoch black mass.

If this group keep this stuff up, rank-and-file members who actually want to win an election should occupy their offices, and put a stop to their treachery and sabotage. Anything’s better than the possibility they may throw it away for you, surely? Or true believers can look forward to the increased possibility of a late Saturday night in May, standing around saying “Albo gave a good concession speech…”

And I am not the only one in the media politics hinterland to conclude from these events that our complicit mainstream media is now beyond any sort of joke, a broke-down, right-wing propaganda mill of some dirtwater junta dogpatch somewhere, run by vipers, their shivering sycophants and enabling airheads without a care for what their country has become, or where it’s going next. Requiescat in pace. Res ipsa loquitor.