Whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political realities, the thirst for freedom is very simple: It means believing that if regimes built 10ft wall you will create a 12ft ladder.
~ Wade In From the Cold! (Kimberley was also fond of Maria’s blog)
When a distressed Bill Shorten wondered in an interview on Friday whether Kimberley Kitching would have been better off never going near politics, he was clearly admonishing Labor Party colleagues who he felt had treated his friend badly. He was also quite possibly, in his grief, taking himself to task.
Kimberley wasn't a political babe in the woods. She played hard, a Labor warrior who knew how to crash through with a smile on her face.
Kimberley Kitching profile courtesy of Good Weekend
The night Kimberley Kitching faced a police checkpoint
The Labor senator could have become an influential figure in a Shorten government. Instead, she was a rare Labor Party MP advocating individual freedoms.
Aaron PatrickSenior correspondentOn the second day of the war in Ukraine, a fighter caught Kimberley Kitching’s eye.
Her name was Irina Tsvila. Like Kitching, she was a 52-year-old woman with a stubborn streak and a passion for politics.
Kimberley Kitching during a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra in February. Alex Ellinghausen
She had died that day, with her husband, fighting a Russian armoured column trying to break into Kyiv. They had five children. Kitching retweeted Tsvila’s photo without comment.
The Labor senator was obsessed with the war, judging from her Twitter feed.
Day after day she shared posts from Ukraine, a conflict that, she must have felt, vindicated her Cassandra-like warnings to the Labor Party that authoritarian states on the left were Australia’s greatest external threat.
Freedom was her guiding a philosophy, a belief in the individual that isolated her somewhat within the Victorian Labor Party, where she and her husband, Andrew Landeryou, spent much of their adult lives pursuing factional warfare.
Rereading Rousseau
Last year, when Melbourne was in the depths of one of Labor Premier Daniel Andrews’ pandemic lockdowns, Kitching was stopped at a police checkpoint after curfew.
“They asked for my papers,” she told me.
To understand her emotional response, that night she reread passages in French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract.
The book, which would help incite the French Revolution, argued an unorthodox theory at the time: monarchs had no divine right to power, which could only be bestowed upon political leaders by their fellow citizens.
Kimberley Kitching and Andrew Landeryou arrive for the 2017 Midwinter Ball at Parliament House in Canberra. Alex Ellinghausen
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau wrote. “Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”
Melbourne circle
Kitching had lived in France as a child, spoke French, and loved its cultural and political history. The daughter of a chemistry lecturer, she grew up in Brisbane, studied law at the University of Queensland, and moved to Melbourne in 1995 to be with Landeryou.
A high school friend of Bill Shorten’s second wife, Chloe, she entered his social circle, which embroiled her in 2½ decades of personal and political drama centred on the leading figure of the Victorian Labor Party’s Right faction.
Andrews’ Socialist Left group were their enemies, more so than the Liberal Party, where Kitching’s free-market, pro-US and pro-Israeli views would have made her mainstream.
Thanks to Shorten’s patronage, and her organisational and intellectual talents, Kitching became general manager of the Victorian Health Services Union when it was taken over by a Shorten acolyte in 2012.
Entering the Senate
With a Labor-affiliated union and the party leader behind her, Kitching was able, against considerable internal opposition, to replace Stephen Conroy in the Senate in 2016.
Kimberley Kitching was photographed in December 2017 for a Good Weekend profile published in 2018. Kristoffer Paulsen
The definitive Kitching profile, published in Good Weekend by Matthew Knott two years later, quoted a former Labor senator, Sam Dastyari, as predicting Kitching would enjoy “a meteoric rise in the Senate”.
Meteoric it was not. The Labor Party’s failure to win the 2019 election foiled predictions that Kitching and Landeryou would become the primary informal political advisers to Shorten as prime minister.
After the loss, Kitching received a minor promotion, to shadow parliamentary secretary for government accountability. Last January she became Shorten’s parliamentary secretary, or assistant shadow minister, covering the National Disability Scheme and government services.
From this small platform, she played an important but little-noticed role in two of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s bigger problems.
It was Kitching, in a Senate committee hearing in October 2020, who asked Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate whether it was appropriate to reward her managers with Cartier watches.
When public opinion turned in favour of Holgate, who was forced out the job, Kitching turned up to the Senate in white, a colour Holgate’s supporters had adopted in sympathy.
Some time in 2020, Kitching received an anonymous letter claiming that officials in the Department of Parliamentary Services, which employs Parliament House’s security guards, had tried to cover up a rape, according to a Four Corners report by Sean Nicholls.
The alleged victim was the political adviser Brittany Higgins.
The assertion that security guards had altered reports and physically cleaned the office where Higgins said she was attacked fed into conspiracy theories that continue to damage the Morrison government.
(The man accused, Bruce Lehrmann, has pleaded not guilty. Morrison said he didn’t know about the rape allegation until after his office was contacted by a journalist.)
Weight loss
In the past six months, Kitching’s appearance was transformed by a sudden loss of weight.
She continued to make regular appearances on Sky News, where she was one of a few Labor MPs embraced by the right-of-centre television channel, not least because she often sounded like a Liberal.
She worked with a Liberal senator, Eric Abetz, to introduce a Magnitsky law that allows the government to seize assets from people who have abused human rights around the world.
On Thursday, Kitching was driving in a northern Melbourne suburb when her chest began to hurt, according to reports, and called Landeryou. She died there, possibly from a heart attack.
Bill and Chloe Shorten, who live nearby, went to the scene to comfort Landeryou.
“We sat with a couple of dear friends of Kimberley and Andrew on the side of the road as we waited for the undertaker’s van to turn up,” Shorten said in a radio interview. “So very sad. Unbelievable.”
Kimberley Kitching’s journey from captain’s pick to the cold shoulder
If Kimberley was alive today she would most likely tweet a link to Krastev’s opinion piece in this weekend London’s salmon newspaper, the Financial Times:
Russian politics
The west cannot turn its back on ordinary Russians
It would be a historic mistake to assume that autocracy is destiny in Moscow
The writer is chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and permanent fellow at IWM Vienna
It was only a matter of hours after Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine that Marina Davidova, the esteemed Russian theatre critic, wrote an open letter against the war. The Russian Duma responded with alacrity, fast-tracking legislation that included prison sentences of up to 15 years for criticising the invasion.
Davidova soon became subject to vicious harassment, receiving hate mail and finding the notorious white “Z” borne by Russian military vehicles in Ukraine painted on her door the next day. Fearful for her life, she fled Russia.
Once she got out, however, Davidova was surprised to discover a twisted new reality.
When in Moscow, she had been treated by the secret service as a traitor. But in western Europe, she was now perceived as a Russian occupier, possibly an agent — a person complicit with Putin. Her Russian bank cards no longer worked and her Austrian bank account was blocked. It was her passport, not her story, that mattered. Sotto voce, her friends told her that the idea of a “good Russian” was now a thing of the past.
Europeans who criticise ordinary Russians for not denouncing the war en masse have a point, but they miss an important nuance: Russia today is a brutal police state and in Putin’s worldview to be a traitor (and for the president any citizen who opposes the war is a traitor) is far worse than to be an enemy. Putin once put it with terrifying clarity: “Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed.”
With their heroic resistance to the Russian war machine, the Ukrainian people have earned their status as Putin’s enemies. But when it comes to Russia’s internal opposition, the only option he will consider is to crush them.
Of course it is not hard to understand why people outside Russia have turned against the country. Putin has not only destroyed Ukraine’s military and energy infrastructure, he also smashed the moral and intellectual infrastructure of postwar Europe. By justifying his invasion in Ukraine as a “special operation” aimed at “denazifying” the country, Putin took deliberate aim at the foundations on which the European order has been based. And by putting Russian nuclear forces on “high alert”, he crossed a line not crossed since the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago.
The west is at war with Putin’s regime, and this conflict will last far longer than the fighting in Ukraine. It is clear that western sanctions are not designed to change Putin’s mind but to destroy his capabilities. They will also hurt ordinary Russians. Since Russia is a significant nuclear power, the west has no other option.
Some outside Russia are seduced by the possibility of a palace coup in Moscow, but the prospects for such an outcome are slim. History teaches us that in a crisis like this the majority of the people, as well as political elites, initially stand with their leader rather than turn against him. It is only with the passing of time that they change their mind.
While in the short term the west’s priority should be to provide support to Ukraine, in the medium and long term it needs a strategy on Russia that goes beyond military containment.
We have shifted easily (and lazily) from complacency to moral outrage. We are shocked that Russians have allowed themselves to be taken in by Putin’s propaganda, forgetting that they are not the only ones capable of living a lie. A poll conducted in 2015, more than a decade after the American invasion of Iraq, found that 52 per cent of Fox News viewers believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. Let us also recall that enthusiasm for Putin as a defender of “European values” was stronger in some western quarters than in Russia itself.
In his unsettlingly prophetic 2006 novel, Day of the Oprichnik, the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin imagines a future for his country as a medieval-style theocracy where the monarchy has been restored, flogging is back, and the official ideology is a kind of corruption-friendly mysticism. A Great Wall divides Russia from the west, all goods come from China, and all ideas emerge from an imagined past.
It is easy to imagine tomorrow’s Russia resembling Sorokin’s nightmares. Europe will never feel secure sharing a border with a Russia like this. Turning our backs on those Russians courageous enough to oppose Putin’s war, even to those who do not have the will to oppose it but at least the decency not to support it, will be a strategic mistake.
After the end of the cold war, the west assumed Russia would follow the road taken by postwar Germany. But Russia’s behaviour over the past decade resembles Germany during the period after the first world war, not the second.
Three decades ago many in the west naively believed that a democratic future was the only possible path for post-Soviet Russia. Now we are making a comparable mistake in assuming that a post-Putin Russia could not be anything but his Russia with another strongman ruler.
A message from Moscow: ‘It’s like I’m in a nightmare. And I can’t wake up.’
