A patriot mourned amid angry claims of hypocrisy

Last year’s Human Rights Commission review into the workplace culture of parliament uncovered the reality of bullying by women. It thus seems tragically ironic that as a renowned human rights campaigner in parliament, Senator Kitching was allegedly “bullied” by female MPs in her own party.

That Labor’s Michael Danby and Bill Shorten were apparently powerless to alleviate her stressful situation, engendered by “mean girls” in the party is possibly testimony to a more inconvenient truth about the role of gender in political power games.

It seems imperative to understand that a gender perspective can be distorted to confirm bias without any basis in fact.