At the funeral of Kimberley Kitching — a senator, a daughter, a wife and perhaps much more

Yellow light falling on the stone pillars, arches leaping to the high ceiling, the pews full back to the doors, the cross on the altar gleaming, soft chords from the organ all around, blue sky outside, sun beating down on black stone. Yesterday afternoon at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne hosted two funerals, intertwined, for the same woman, the late senator Kimberley Kitching: one a glorious celebration by Labor and its right faction, the other a transcendentally sad spectacle of a parent eulogising their child, a family mourning a woman in her prime.

They all came after two weeks in which Kitching had been turned from a little-known senator into a champion of human rights and a cause célèbre of alleged wrongs, accusations of bullying made on the base of pretty limited public evidence. No matter. She had become a heroine in Roman Catholic style, and the country’s great and good had turned out for her: Labor’s Anthony Albanese, Dan Andrews, Bill Shorten, Jacinta Collins in a 1950s sponge-cake hat, Kim Carr a vast expanse of pinstripe.

And the enemy, Peter Dutton, outside, indistinguishable from the scowling plainclothes security; Barnaby beet-red beneath a white stetson; Alan Tudge in Clark Kent disguise glasses; Nicolle Flint, all frown and angles in couture black, like an Athol Shmith model on the lam; Tony Abbott lurching and gurning, a David Rowe cartoon of himself; Peta Credlin with that 1978 eyeshadow and cruiserweight jaw; Pauline Hanson and her care– her consigliere, James Ashby.

The favoured journos came up the front, Samantha Maiden, ensconced in the bosom of the family and friends; tight, knobbly Chris Uhlmann turning his hard, lizardine stare to the light suffusing the chancel; tall, wild-eyebrowed Andrew Bolt, taking a break from the tough harvest at Somers. Golden saffron robes of Buddhist monks, the Dalai Lama crew. Michael Danby and over there Michael Danby. There seemed to be three or four of them, white haired, pince-nez short and essentially spherical, probably one the actual and the other three all, back far enough, from the same village near Minsk. Unless Mossad has given him some assassin decoys. Diana Asmar in her red clown hair, like an exploded Magnum of rosé spumante. O Fortuna! What a procession of our rulers and their courtiers!

All still coming in too, as the service began, and then the goombahs, the rank-and-file, the boys in vinyl jackets and ties and hair slicked back with a licked hand, the un-ironed shirts and the mismatched suits, and the branch members in black T-shirts, showing their respect. The sleek Real Housewives of Labor Unity in saucer-size shades and Gazman black A-lines, and the big SDA union mamas in floral prints, and the simply plainly lost, in green skivvies and striped tops because of something they’d heard of her, a final settling-in as husband Andrew Landeryou ascended for the first eulogy, soft beard hanging above the spread-winged gold eagle that was the lectern’s top, like he was an acolyte of the last Tsar, which he kinda is.

Make no mistake about it, this was a historical moment, one brought on by freak tragedy, that flung together a whole lot of separate elements in our culture: the widening split between elite and mass, the dying factions of Labor, the rotting away of our mainstream media and the spectralisation of the public sphere. Yes, this was a woman who could have gone very far, even if her current renown has been utterly exaggerated. Yes, she could have made it to cabinet, could have been a PM contender.

She had cosmopolitan world experience, the product — as her father, Bill, noted in his modest and focused memoriam — of a childhood spent travelling the world as the daughter of academic parents. That combined with a conservative geopolitical vision and social values, without such peoples’ frequent cloying diffidence and parochialism, means she might have had the possibility of being the sort of prime minister Kim Beazley imagined he could have been, after the Keating deluge, returning Labor to a nationalist ideal capable of winning the nation’s support.

Nothing exposed yesterday here about Kitching countermands that; she hardly would have been the first Labor PM with that sort of record. She was certainly the best hope of that part of the right, for revival and ascension, and now she is gone.

How that may be the end of a few things could be heard in Bill Shorten’s speech, given third, after Kitching père. Later, some would say it was alright; I heard only a man running close to empty. As he rattled through her CV, her achievements, her skills, her Magnitsky award, in a voice as rigid as packing board — from grief? from habit? — he sounded like a man well on the way to over, and he’s sounded half way there for a while. Long gone is the bouncing Duracell Bunny of the ’80s and ’90s faction wars, seen by all of Australia during the Beaconsfield Mine cave-in, the slow-burn disaster that made his name. The last two elections he sounded fey and tired, like a resting actor who runs a bed-and-breakfast; now he sounded done, maybe by the occurrence we were marking.

He told us of Kitching’s successful efforts to save Afghan civilians from the fall of Kabul, at a distance, with a couple of genuinely hair-raising stories. Am I being fair, I wonder, or is it simply my animus when I say that even with this material he couldn’t run any energy through the audience, who had begun to shift slightly in the wooden pews? I dunno. He finally lit it up with an anecdote about a multifamily visit to the ghastly Titanic restaurant, tricked by a playful Kitching into wearing Edwardian costume, which the other 200 patrons weren’t. Yeah. It was sweet, it was funny, it sketched out Kitching well, and it could have been told at a Collingwood councillors retirement dinner in 1961, for all the moment he could bring to it.

But it was Andrew Landeryou who rose to the moment, in the first speech given that was moving and accomplished, modest and open-hearted, drawing together the private and public character of his wife. The service had begun with a reading of a letter from the Dalai Lama to Landeryou. OK I thought, now I have officially seen and heard everything. He spoke of meeting Kitching at a Queensland Young Labor do in the mid-1990s — “I had been warned of her (formidable intelligence).” Pause. “She had certainly been warned about me”. Got a good laugh.

He spoke of her belief in America, and the last best hope, and Bobby Kennedy, and I tried to find the principle amid the naïveté of all that. He spoke of her as the better part of him, of restraining his worst qualities, mitigating his disasters. He left so many of those disasters out of the telling that he sounded like a Marxist giving a history of the USSR. He reflected that she might have been better off without him. He quoted Henley’s Invictus: “I have not winced or cried aloud / Under the bludgeonings of chance” — his voice caught for a second, and I found myself mouthing the kicker, “my head is bloody but unbowed”.

Many would agree that Kitching may have gone further without him, but she clearly wasn’t one of them. Whether that was because they were star-crossed lovers or natural born killers is a question for history. None of the essentially sociopathic things this man has lent his energy to, the destruction and suffering he has caused, were undone by this speech — but nor do they tarnish the dignity and grace of it, this commendation to the light, spoken from a place I am sure is nearer to the dark.

But the sun was still bright in the late afternoon they bore the bier out to, grey hearse in the forecourt, first hint of red in the plane trees at the back of Parliament. Lovely Melbourne summer turn to fall, as the mourners lined both sides of the street, an arrangement spelling out KIMBA in white flowers in the hearse windows, first as tragedy then as kitsch. “You are invited to the reception at the Hyatt Park”, the program said. I thought for a second and then decided that, out of respect, like Billy Hughes, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, brother.

The crowds hung round. I was trying to eavesdrop on the gabbing of Bridget McKenzie and Michaelia Cash, the latter in a sort of bronze-and-black full length that looked like it had been torn off a freshwater crocodile while it was still alive, possibly at a Boxing Day sale. Matthew Guy dashed around trying to find someone to shake hands with, Tim Smith walked straight out and kept going, Sam Dastyari hung out round the back talking to the comms car drivers. Anxiety cracked open. William Wardell’s cathedral loomed over us, black as a shadow of itself, the last great Gothic masterpiece built, rough stone rising from the ground like a single outcrop pointing to God, over this crowd of true believers, chancers and brokens. All political careers end in failure, as St Enoch said. Some of those who were at this, began there.

A Buddhist monk was softly dinging finger cymbals under a tree. Nearby, in a circle of six or so, one of the Michael Danbys was talking to the Ukrainian ambassador. He was a tall one. Uhlmann was looking up at him adoringly. Would the skin-mask come off? The ambassador appeared to suggest Poland would soon invade Russia, but don’t hold me to that, I wouldn’t want to create an incident. “Hyey Freddie,” someone yelled at him from a car. “Wye’re gyoing to the gyovernyers! You wyanna cyome?” The ambassador made his excuses. First as tragedy, then as Saturday Night Live sketch. When you’ve died, the pieces of the world you held together start to fly apart, and that was starting to happen now, as the afternoon began to cool.

Yesterday’s article had circulated. There were one or two looks. “Nice work genius,” someone said. “That’ll give it a few more days run.” That deserves a response, which is that Labor — both its buffeted centre and its internal miscreants causing the trouble — is foolish to believe that such scandal politics can be turned on and then off, for factional gain, as the election roars nearer, and “bigger” issues take over.

That’s how it used to run. But we live in an utterly atomised society now. For many people outside this retro-chic freak show of party life, the adjudication of personal relationships — at work, at home, in such community as exists — is politics. And ethics. They don’t give a damn about Bobby Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan, or the right’s sad nostalgia for a neoconservative past that gave us this present. They latched on to Kitching because a media blitz said she was bullied, and when they looked they saw, though a genuine cosmopolitan, someone ’burban and a little basic, whereas the women accused of being her tormenters, (for normal party activity and abrasiveness), looked sharp and elite, like their bosses, or season four of Killing Eve.

Yes, people care about jobs, and security, and China, etc. But they don’t really know about it, en masse. They do know about bullying, or harassment, or victimhood, or trauma, and so on, because everyday life now consists of the management of such. Don’t believe this stoush, or the next engineered crisis, can be simply put back in a box when it’s required to be. If this gang of desperadoes keep doing it, they’ve got to be acted against. You can’t sit shivering in the black pit hoping they’ll stop before the next Newspoll. The lesson of 30 years is that they never stop. 

That said, it’s probably necessary to add that it’s not only the Shorten grouping the party centre is after, or the remnants of the Somyurek forces. The national left and the Conroyites are seeking to cut off and pretty much kill Kim Carr’s Victorian Socialist Left faction, arguing that Carr’s nationalist social-democratic politics are arcane, that he did it to some of them with past “stability pacts”, and that they really, really just don’t like that guy.

They have been helped by Socialist Left defections, first the “Industrial Left” of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) and Australian Rail Tram and Bus Industry Union (RTBU), now in some disarray, and more recently by the “Giles” left, a group around Scullin MP Andrew Giles, a descendant of a left grouping put together by Lindsay Tanner in the 1990s after he and others took the Federated Clerks Union away from the right — and on the march to technocracy from the very start (via Eurocommunism, Denise Richards).

Kim Carr and the Socialist Left urgently want to revive Australian car and heavy industry through public-private coordination of research and production, creating a North European-style, virtuous upward spiral of an ever-more-skilled working class, eventually becoming expert technicians, giving us self-sustaining autonomy and export industries. People on the Giles left urgently want to re-gender Melbourne tourist attraction the clipper ship Polly Woodside as “they/them”. This is not an entirely fair summary, but ehhh.

So, yes, the process isn’t just a stoush with the Shorten group, but they’re the only ones taking it outside the party, and creating empath narratives that the Coalition can use to pull themselves out of the pit. Nevertheless, the party centre’s push is undoubtably a total power grab. In recent times some linkages between the Victorian Socialist Left and Kitching developed, since they want to make cars, and she tanks against the coming Chinese invasion.

The forces these two statist tendencies are up against — the “National” Left and the Conroyite Right — are essentially minimalist technocrats, left and right of a social market/neoliberal divide. The Nat Left want to roll out programs that supplement the dominance of the market rather than move beyond it; the Conroyite Right don’t seem to care what gender your nine-year-old thinks it is.

Differences on world affairs are narrower. The elimination of alternative viewpoints is, in their eyes, streamlining the party. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m on Carr’s side on this, and the pincer movement against them fills me with melancholy. But O paradox, it must be said that with the death of Kitching, that goal got, in the most awful possible way, somewhat closer.

That was what was happening here, the end of something more than the life of Kimberley Kitching. It’s the ending of factions as we had known them, the last Tsars, though they’ve been a long time in the going. The post-2008 global socialist wave that might have lifted the Socialist Left’s boats has abated. And whatever crazed, “patriotic” energy exists outside the mainstream, the plasticated Americophilia of the Landeryou-Kitchings, the fading bedroom obsessions of the SDA have no power of inspiration. It’s no go the finger chime / it’s no go Magnitsky / All we want is a cup of chai / And a password for your Netflix.

Would fresh events bring internal conflict around real ideas back? Yes, but not in the forms inherited from the 1990s, which were themselves inherited from the Cold War. If you went into politics thinking, “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul”, wow did you read the wrong poem.

Evening had come, everyone had gone. Yellow lights on across the park at Bourke Hill, the two or three cafes there open bright against the vault of the blue-black sky. I put the service program in my pocket, said a silent farewell to quite a lot, walked to Pellegrini’s, recognised it as the losers’ club, myself there, went in and had dinner with John Roskam.