‘So much work still to do’
"Yes she was ambitious, yes she ruffled feathers, but always for a righteous cause..."
Twenty-five years ago local radio crackled – a newly elected Melbourne City councillor, Kimberley Kitching, had scrubbed some anti-Israel “tagging” from the tourist laneways of the central city. Albert Dadon, chair of the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange, heard this by chance and tracked Kimberley down at the Town Hall.
Minutes later, they were lunching and conversing in animated French – typical Kimberley. She was only a senator for one term (six years) when she died last week. As others have said, it is achingly sad that the whip-smart, vivacious and principled senator died of a sudden heart attack.
From whence did her powerful cosmopolitan persona emerge? Probably from her years of travel, accompanying her parents as a child, as her father Bill was posted to various academic institutions. Bill, a renowned organic chemistry professor, spent time at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
Over more than a decade, Kimberley and her husband Andrew attended our extended family seder where she delighted in our family’s Pesach costumes, each year wearing the headdress of Pharaoh’s daughter Bitiah, who saved Moses from the Nile.
Her cultural sympathy with Israel and Jews was a lifelong trait although she was a frum Catholic. She had an unusual cultural understanding of all kinds of minorities. Every peaceful Hong Konger, Baha’i, Tibetan, Uyghur or Taiwanese had her ear and solidarity.
She participated in the regular pre-COVID Australia-Israel dialogues at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and also delighted in the Old City, the glorious range of doughnuts in Tel Aviv during Chanukah and the entrepreneurial spirit of the Israeli people.
Of course, she was the ranking Opposition Deputy of the Parliamentary Friends of Israel, together with those of the United States, Baha’i and Tibetan Parliamentary friendship groups. His Holiness The Dalai Lama issued a statement grieving her death and recognising her significant achievements.
Kimberley was ahead of other public figures and vocal about the response to the Chinese government’s bullying of Australia. Beijing’s arrogant “14 demands” insist Australia must constrain our democracy before China lifts its embargo on Australian imports. Since the Chinese government adopted its wolf warrior tactics against Australia, the authoritative Lowy Institute poll shows that 80 per cent of Australians distrust China.
Senator Kitching – pro American, pro-Israel and staunchly supportive of human rights – ardently reflected that newly-felt Australian discomfort with China. Her response was to join with others to form a parliamentary group called the Wolverines to counter Chinese propaganda.
She was an old-fashioned social democrat, deeply soaked of the values of Western civilisation.
Yes she was ambitious, yes she ruffled feathers, but always for a righteous cause.
Australia, for instance, was slow to adopt the Magnitsky Human Rights laws that enable countries to sanction individuals such as Russian oligarchs or the heads of Beijing’s concentration camps for their treatment of Uyghur minorities. Kimberley was anxious to corral the doubtful leftists in her own party into supporting this human rights push-back.
So, she manoeuvred. She organised the conservative government to call a public hearing into these prospective Magnitsky laws. Kimberley knew there would emerge a bi-partisan support for the legislation. She collaborated with Magnitsky Laws’ international sponsor and US businessman, Bill Browder. They organised the appearance of Amal Clooney and renowned Australian lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC to testify at the committee’s hearings.
The “A-listers” duly appeared and then as Kimberley expected, the next chess piece fell as the Australian Labor Party announced it would join the government in passing the legislation. This was largely due to Kimberley’s masterful stewardship of the legislation.
Subsequently at a glittering ceremony in London, Kimberley appeared to receive a justly deserved global human rights award.
In Australia, few first-term or indeed even long-term members of parliament have Kimberley’s legacy of policy achievements. This explains why there has been such passion and grief expressed about her untimely demise across the parliamentary aisles, in every recess of Australia and across the globe.
In her last op-ed excoriating the sack of Ukraine, Kimberley casually dropped into her observations, a quote from the poet Khalil Gibran, “Life without liberty is like a body without a spirit.”
That was her own ethos. Her fearless love of her country and human rights, and unusually Israel and the Jewish people, marked her as a rare and precious bird.
Gone from us now.
So much work still to do, especially in these dangerous times.
Her memory is a blessing.
The Honourable Michael Danby was previously parliamentary Secretary of the Arts and chairman of the Australian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. He and his wife Amanda were close friends of Kimberley Kitching and her husband Andrew Landeryou for nearly 30 years. Danby and Kitching convened a regular luncheon group of ‘China experts’ the day she died.
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