How the idea of a woman bullied to death can take on hero status

The right’s determination to turn senator Kimberley Kitching’s death into a cause that will open a flank against Labor has gone from desperate to saturnine in a matter of days. The only thing more amazing than the desire to strip this event to its bones has been the willingness of a supine “neutral” media to facilitate this ridiculous notion that absolutely normal factional argy-bargy around committee memberships and Senate questions, and a few sharp insults, constitutes a campaign of bullying.

What is weirder is that the whole thing seems to be catching on in the public imagination. How could this be? Don’t people understand that politics, even within parties, is contestation, and that a certain baseline of aggression is the process? Then again, of course they don’t.

Politics — the sort of politics that informs party factions, where there is some vestigial attachment to a position on big political questions — is now so far from the daily imagination that many just don’t begin to understand it, or how it could drive people. “Bullying” and “trauma” have become such central ideas of daily life and power that this is the only way many people can understand political conflict.

They work in large organisations in an atomised postmodern society. Structures of solidarity — unions, neighbourhoods, kin — have been blasted apart. And so the idea of a woman bullied to death can take on hero status.

Had we a press gallery of any sort of substantial integrity, they’d point out to their dwindling public that not only does none of this count as bullying by any sort of self-respecting adult standard, but that factions of both parties do a lot worse to each other on a regular basis and recombine for elections, and that everyone in politics is either laughing at this notion that a nasty joke in a committee room is bullying, or furious that certain elements on the Labor Right are getting away with a beat-up political culture war.

The hard fact, worth considering by a critically minded press gallery, would be that a trail of petty bullying accusations by the late Kitching may be evidence that this 30-year factional warrior might just have been laying down a trail by which a procedural challenge to her deselection from the Senate ticket could be made, had she lived long enough for that to happen.

What? A life-long factional warrior playing internal party procedural games? Noooo. The “neutral” press gallery doesn’t want to muddy the waters with a complex story, because they know how much the general readership love a simple victimhood tale.

They also know that said sections of the Victorian Right are so hostile to the current leadership of the party, and so antagonistic to the progressive social policy and multilateral foreign policy the ALP has adopted, that they see Labor as more of an enemy than the Coalition, and will leak like lawn sprinklers against their own party in exchange for preferential media access.

Thus, with the small band of Labor rightists around Kitching willing to ramrod the victim narrative that they knew the media would be amenable to, the wider right has sprung into action behind it. Their willingness to do so is a measure of their desperation in the face of Labor’s strong numbers, because they are now muddying the messaging they’ve been pumping out with regards to the Russia-Ukraine war: that the West has become weak and decadent and self-absorbed.

Furthermore they’ve yoked that to a purported push for a no-fly zone — one they know, or believe, can be used for culture war purposes because it will never be acted on. It’s a high-stakes game to buff up an imaginary notion of right-wing identity and toughness.

So to have to switch to the victimhood narrative around Kitching, and entertain notions of legitimate fragility, was a major tactical detour. They’d tried it before, turning “larrikin” Bill Leak postmortem into a cringing, fearful victim, killed by his alleged fear of the 18C tribunal. And later when Nicolle Flint, the Liberal member for leafy Boothby, played the gender card over Extinction Rebellion peacefully protesting her office. Trying to portray civil disobedient property damage as misogyny pushed the female victimhood narrative into the territory that enthusiasts such as Janet Albrechtsen had previously chided feminista students for harping on.

The Kitching event is this sort of hypocrisy on steroids, and it’s the fact of the right doing both at the same time — the macho act pushing us to a war in a terrifying situation to which there are no good outcomes, and the attempt to turn a sad death into some sort of soft murder — that gives it a really dark edge.

None of these people – who work in the cutthroat, backstabbing, factionalising, effing blinding world of media and politics — give any indication that they really believe this low-bar notion of bullying or apply it elsewhere. Yet the argument was trotted out lockstep by Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin (on Sky), Michael Danby, Johannes Leak, Pauline Hanson, Samantha Maiden, Sharri Markson and James Morrow. And this morning, Sharri Markson has a 600-word story extending the bullying arc, and based on this text:

“Wong has been bad … She would love to never see me again.”

Yeah, there’s your murder weapon. At this pathetic point I would suggest this whole demented charade has itself become demeaning to Kitching’s memory.

What prompts this extreme mobilisation, which tests the credibility? Peta Credlin gave it away on Sky yesterday: it’s not that Labor might win, but that it might win with a left leadership. That would not only break the myth that only the right can win Labor government — it would underline the six defeats the right has taken Labor to since 1996.

This entire extraordinary moment was started by Bill Shorten’s outburst to the ABC the day of Kitching’s death, alleging a party contribution to the event. We’ll have to take this as a passionate outcry, with the national broadcaster handy.

But here’s a measure of the degree to which politics has come apart as an organising principle: if I suggested that the best thing Shorten could have done for everyone — except Scott Morrison — would have been to keep quiet and express his anger privately, for the good of the party, I suspect the reaction would be one of horror, that such emotion would be subordinated to a greater good. Yet that is exactly what a party could and should demand of its members if politics is to mean anything.

For much of the general public, a passionate outburst across all media will seem like an authentic reaction. Perhaps it is. But it also appears to have served as a repurposing of a plan for factional political survival laid down months earlier, and one whose numerous supporters further diminish our public culture and our national life.