And now for the real deal: Labor’s factional wars go into overdrive as the red benches beckon

The pace is really picking up in Labor’s preselection wars, thrown into public visibility by the sudden death of senator Kimberley Kitching. Had that not occurred, the public would be hearing a few mumblings about the efforts to remove an obscure senator — Kitching — as a sideshow to the real deal of toppling Victorian socialist Left titan Kim Carr. 

Were Kitching still in place, her faction — run by Bill Shorten — through their complicit propagandists in the mainstream media would still have pulled the stops out to ward off threats to their position, spinning out a media campaign about their wholesome, mainstream, religious conservative senator, under attack from shadowy progressive elites within the party. That would have stayed within the loose bounds of public waging of internal factional war, make your play, don’t frighten the horses, etc.

Instead Kitching’s death took the process to Defcon One. The sudden vacancy in the Senate list meant that the Shorten/AWU group wasn’t defending an incumbent member, it was fighting for a plum seat up for grabs. A safe Labor Senate seat in Victoria? You could ease your bum into the red benches and not be moved for decades. 

So the Shorten group campaign went into absolute overdrive, with any consideration of wider electoral damage thrown to the winds.

The campaign to portray Kitching’s death as due to “bullying”, and the demand for an internal inquiry, was the Shorten faction’s equivalent of robbing a bank with a bomb strapped to your chest: one move and we all go up. Dozens of columnists in News Corp, Nine and even the ABC were happy to lend their bit of support to the push. 

That may well have been a success, though at a heavy cost, with news that the party centre — the Feds who took over the Victorian branch after revelations of Adem Somyurek’s branch stacking — may acquiesce in permitting the vacancy caused by Kitching’s death to be filled by a member of the Shorten/AWU faction. The name of Victorian Youth Crime and Corrections Minister Natalie Hutchins is being bandied about. 

Really, the “National Left”/Conroyite Right alliance that now runs the joint would like to install one of its own. It’s a tantalising chance to further marginalise the Shorten/AWU headbangers who have been responsible for more mayhem and bad press for Labor over the past 20 years than all the other factions put together. It knows now that this grouping will absolutely trash the campaign if it has to in fighting for its survival — but may be sufficiently mollified. 

But that may not be enough for other elements in Kitching’s support base — the pro-US defence establishment, headed by ASPI, the warmongering lobby group founded by the Department of Defence under John Howard and now funded by major defence contractors; the armaments industry lobby; and the Australian Zionist lobby.

For all three Kitching was a godsend — a senator with DLP/SDA union geopolitics but situated in the more mainstream, less crazy Shorten/AWU faction.

For a moment during the funeral I had a Pynchonesque vision of actual missiles and bunker buster bombs sitting in the pews, weeping into handkerchiefs at the departed.

The war lobby has always mobilised against left-wing elements in Labor governments — even the centrist left outfit that Albanese’s “National Left” has become. But now it may be more concerned by the rise of the Conroyite Right (still called that, even though Stephen Conroy is in the gaming lobby, fighting the scourge of working-class gambling addiction from the inside) since it is moving further away from Cold War right positions. 

Thus it was that South Australian Senator Don Farrell suddenly popped up as a “friend and mentor” of Kitching in the public prints. Farrell is an SDA faction boss, and as an SA senator, pretty much a representative of the armaments industry, on which that parched, perpetually desperate state depends. His statement that Kitching “would have won preselection” — rolled out on Sky News and dutifully stenographised by Guardian Australia without contextualising his factional role, presumably through simple ignorance — was simply a statement of claim to the seat from outside the core of Shorten’s faction on behalf of the foreign-policy right. 

These groupings may be satisfied with someone like Hutchins in the Senate spot, but one group who could be keen to continue the party war is the Right’s Zionist lobby that petrified of any loss of position within an Albanese government. Thus the story in today’s Age, in which David Crowe’s article has “friend” of Kitching Michael Danby continuing to push for an inquiry within the party, weeks out from an election.

 So this is another example of Gay Alcorn’s Age simply transmitting right-wing propaganda by omission, because while Danby is undoubtably championing the memory of his late friend, they weren’t exactly crochet buddies. Danby is the prime mover of the Zionist lobby within Labor; Kitching was its rock-solid ally, and the lobby would be worried about positions an Albanese government might take on Israel/Palestine once in office. 

By any reasonable measure, it needn’t. Any fully militant pro-Palestinian position is largely gone from Labor. But Israel’s periodic Gaza mayhem is losing global support fast. The next invasion, post-Ukraine, may attract sanctions. The Zionists would be desperate to make sure that an Albanese government would hold the line — and if it can’t guarantee that, it will help Morrison win another term.

In parallel with all that, Carr fights to keep his seat, and to keep a nationalist social democratic industry policy on the table. But he’s doing that within bounds, you might say.

These other punks? They will trash their own party right up to election day if they need to, draw on any ally they can find, no matter how sleazy, and will keep on doing it until people within the party have the courage to publicly call them out, and name names. Now, not after yet another close, “Oh no, what happened?” defeat. Otherwise the promised land will be as far away as ever, and there will be more years for the locust.