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

There are wider issues around the behaviour of the late senator Kimberley Kitching — whose tragic and far-too-early death was marked yesterday in Melbourne — and that of her Labor colleagues than the fictions spun by much of the press gallery.

They are issues the press gallery will never, ever touch because it goes to the role of political journalists and the increasingly toxic role they play in our democracy.

M’colleague Guy Rundle brilliantly outlined many of those issues yesterday in a piece that told truths that political journalists have been unwilling to tell because they don’t fit the preferred narrative of Kitching as valiant human rights defender bullied to death by Labor.

There are other issues, too, that reflect the dire state of Australian party politics and the complicity of the mainstream media in it.

Kitching was an average senator. We shall look upon her like — the factional warrior and long-term party operative elevated to elected office and a higher public profile — again. In fact, you can’t avoid looking upon them right now if you look around either chamber. They’re everywhere.

She was a poor Senate committee performer, often mistaking aggression for forensic questioning in estimates, as her attack on Christine Holgate showed. Labor’s carefully prepared attacks in estimates hearings often faltered when Kitching was left to prosecute them.

And despite the myth that she was a stalwart defender of human rights, in fact she was highly selective in that. As human rights lawyer Rawan Arraf pointed out, Kitching was an ardent defender of apartheid Israel; clearly not all humans were, in her view, entitled to basic rights.

So as a parliamentary performer and consistent advocate, she was no better and certainly no worse than most of the people who shuffle through the Senate via the major parties. And none of that changes that she died far too young and with so much undone.

Where Kitching stands out, however, is an example of how hollowed-out our major parties are. For much of the past 50 years, the narrative around political party membership has been one of constant decline from the mid-century period of genuine mass membership. But in the past two decades, the inexorable decline of membership has morphed into the rise of factional players and powerbrokers.

Such figures have always existed, of course — but being a factional heavyweight in a party with large memberships and powerful unions is very different from being one in a party of double-digit branch memberships and unions that can’t muster 10% of the workforce.

As parties have shrunk, they’ve become ever more the plaything of small-time figures who can, by dint of drawing heavily from targeted community groups, stack their way to power branch by branch.

Kitching’s home state of Victoria, which has thrown up — in both senses — figures like Marcus Bastiaan and Adem Somyurek, is the best example of this process of hollowing-out of political parties that once, in an earlier century, could claim to be mass movements.

And this process has been enabled by the way we’ve allowed political parties to detach themselves from the community and exist independently of electorates. We’ve allowed parties to draw heavily on public funding and donations so that their lack of large memberships isn’t a problem. We’ve allowed the professionalisation of politics so that both sides are dominated by former staffers and party and union executives.

Kitching — who devoted her career to playing intra-party games, undermining factional opponents and pursuing the interests of her own political clique — was the perfect example.

And the media is complicit in the whole process of detaching politics from democracy. At the micro level, political journalists are more than happy to provide platforms for politicians to engage in factional warfare against each other (one press gallery stenographer lamented last week that he’d no longer be receiving prolific WhatsApp messages from Kitching). It makes for great copy, and saves the trouble of actually getting across genuine issues of public policy.

In the world of hollowed-out parties, the media is for leaking to, not holding the powerful to account; for using against your enemies inside the party, not speaking truth to power.

And at the macro level, the media benefits to the tune of tens of millions of dollars every election as political parties, devoid of mass memberships that could drive genuine grassroots election campaigns, try to advertise their way to victory.

The media, every bit as much as the parties, is trapped in an ecosystem where politics is divorced from democracy.

In the end that means that political journalists, as much as or even more than the politicians they cover, are detached from the public interest and the concerns of ordinary Australians. And neither are in any hurry to admit it.

Was Kimberley Kitching bullied to death by Labor? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.