The late senator Kimberley Kitching (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

The sudden and sad death of Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching has been the occasion for a pretty extraordinary display of politicking within the Labor Party, and the usual gormless amnesia in the mainstream media.

Kitching, 52, in a high-pressure job, taking medication for a thyroid problem, died of a heart attack between meetings in the interminable process of selecting Labor’s Victoria Senate list.

From the moment her death was announced, her allies in the subsection of the right were framing it as the product of “bullying” by other factions who had been trying to remove her from the Senate list and had earlier excluded her from the tactics committee.

What else did they have to add to these charges? That someone had made a nasty remark about her childlessness with regards to policy. That was about it. At which point one could only conclude that this wasn’t your grandma’s Labor Party any more. This was what Bill Shorten and others were alleging brought on premature death? Standard factional jockeying and a few nasty remarks?

Fighting for survival

Initially this struck your correspondent as ice-cold. The AWU/Shorten faction is fighting for its survival after former allies — the “cons” — allied with the National (i.e. Albanese) left. Kitching’s elevation to the Senate had only occurred through Shorten’s position as opposition leader, had been heavily criticised at the time, and had been tenuous at best once Shorten was gone (and his ally Adem Somyurek was expelled and his “mods” faction scattered).

Were they so desperate to hold on to internal power that they would give the Coalition the resources to portray Labor as violent, misogynistic etc over nothing but standard political procedure? Apparently so, and using a tragic and unusual death as a pretext. 

Turns out it was a little more complex than that. Sources inside Labor say Kitching was genuinely emotionally distraught over her imminent dumping, and appeared to have been surprised and shocked by her targeting for removal. If true, this is bizarre.

With the federal party taking over the Victorian branch, and an open hunting season on Somyurek and Shorten-aligned state MPs, how could she not have seen what was coming? Had she started to believe her own PR spin — that the former low-level factional warrior, down in the dirty business of using a healthcare union as an operating base, was now a champion of human rights without a political past?

This was the image Kitching cultivated, assisted by those around her, and above all by those basically aligned with the Labor right in the press who were happy to wipe away any history of factional skulduggery.

Foreign policy push

Both Kitching and her supporters vastly overrated the impact this was having in the eyes of the electorate, who care little about foreign policy. This section of the Labor right does tend to see itself in some heroic light — defenders of the West, the US alliance and Israel. The pose made Kitching popular among a right-wing media clique, and little known anywhere else.

But in cultivating that image, and by being so willing to work with Coalition members on foreign policy (i.e. anti-China) questions, Kitching made herself a target for removal. She was working almost as an independent senator.

In particular, her very close political relationship with Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) Senator James Paterson — as part of the ridiculously named “Wolverines” group — raised eyebrows. It was certainly a factor in getting her excluded from the party’s tactics committee.

Although the Shorten/AWU group saw its politics as “moderate right” compared with the SDA crazies, Kitching seemed to be to the right of the SDA. She was de facto a DLP senator within the ALP, and the left was fairly convinced she was leaking anti-Labor-left titbits to the Coalition. Her crime was not honesty or independence, but hubris. 

That her faction — ever more beleaguered with her death — would try on the “bullying” thing is interesting. It appears to mark the end of any notion of Labor as a party expressing toughness and resilience in a fight against capital on behalf of the working- and middle- classes.

Ready to be tough

The idea of Labor, back in the day, was that people going into politics to make a kinder, better world, had to take on a certain toughness — because the bastards on the other side were not encumbered by a generous feeling for anyone.

For a decade or so, Labor made great fun of the Greens’ internal discourse of fairness, anti-bullying etc. Now it’s the Greens who look tougher and more resolute, and Labor which looks like an emotional basket case. 

The charge that vigorous political contestation in a party — a situation you signed on for, competing at that level — caused a fatal heart attack is bullshit, a deliberate category error. If we applied that standard, public life would be unperformable.

It’s snowflakism at its worst, yet none of the right-wing commentariat were willing to call it that.

Labor is obviously hurting itself by using this snowflake language for its internal warfare — but the only conclusion you can draw is that this section of the right doesn’t care. And it seems especially unconcerned that News Corp is running with it big time — with Michael Danby, former member for Tel Aviv, in the Oz today adding to the snowflake line, and a ludicrous beat-up by Sharri Markson as a follow-on.

Why is Labor’s snowflake brigade doing this? Partly it thinks victory is assured enough to take the risk of factional warfare anyway … but also partly because it really doesn’t care about the election. If Labor was to lose, well — everyone else in the party would be so demoralised that the faction could start to rebuild its strength.

You find that too awful to believe? Then don’t join the Labor Party, cos it’ll kill ya.