Liberals brace for impact as Cyclone Moira makes landfall

There is an essential wisdom in politics that regulates the behaviour of nearly all its participants: it is difficult to succeed when your own parliamentary colleagues hate you.

It is not an unbreakable rule (a good morning to you, Ambassador Rudd) and when we are talking about the Victorian Liberal Party, there have always been accommodated hatreds, based on personality differences or perceived slights which, unless you are a Hatfield or a McCoy, or a Kroger or a Costello, are difficult to keep track of.

Moira Deeming and John Pesutto.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

But those caveats aside, political parties only function when people on the same team have either some regard for one another or, in the absence of that, a mutual understanding of what it is they are trying to achieve.

Which brings us to Moira Deeming.

Since December last year, when Federal Court Justice David O’Callaghan ordered that former opposition leader John Pesutto should pay Deeming’s legal costs after she successfully sued him for defamation, weather watchers within the Liberal Party have been nervously monitoring the build-up of a large storm system just off the coast of Melbourne.

On May 16, when the court determined that Pesutto owed Deeming the unpayable sum of $2,308,873.11, the storm was upgraded to a category 3 cyclone, with the potential to cause widespread damage to Pesutto and, in the likely event of bankruptcy, his marginal seat of Hawthorn.

On May 21, when Deeming’s lawyers informed Pesutto’s lawyers that in the event of bankruptcy, they would seek to recover their costs from three former Liberal premiers, three current or former MPs and a list of other party figures who variously contributed to his defence fund, it was upgraded to a category 5.

Although defamation law, like meteorology, is an inexact science, Cyclone Moira is expected to make landfall at 5pm on Friday. This is the deadline for Pesutto to pay his bill.

Barring a last-minute change of heart from the people controlling the finances of the Victorian Liberal Party or the Cormack Foundation, an investment fund established for the party’s benefit, its destructive forces will be unleashed on Deeming’s party room colleagues, her leader Brad Battin, and the party she was elected to represent.

Deeming, like any successful litigant, is entitled to recover legal costs owed to her. But if we step out of the courtroom and return to our essential wisdom in politics, this is not a course of action a parliamentarian would normally take.

Imagine you are a state MP. If a lawyer, in this case defamation expert Patrick George, suggested a way to recover costs that would plunge your party into crisis, force an unwanted byelection and remove any reasonable prospect of forming government after the next state election, would you agree to do it?

The difference with Deeming is that she no longer considers the people who make up the parliamentary ranks of the Victorian Liberal Party her party, if indeed she ever did.

She said as much last week during a podcast with Club Grubbery, an obscure media site run by a paramedic sacked for refusing the jab and a former Qantas pilot turned anti-lockdown campaigner.

Over an hour-long discussion, she talked as a guerrilla fighter might about the need to seize control of the Liberal Party and its direction. “I am not satisfied with the government in this country flipping from Liberal to Labor when neither of them represents anything that I can see as good,” she remarked.

Deeming’s ultimate mission is not to return the Victorian Liberal Party, in its current form, to government. It is to remake it in her ideological image.

In this world, parliamentary colleagues who hold to the traditional values of the party are enemies rather than allies. “If they succeed in getting me out of here it is not as though the Moira Deeming problem will disappear,” she said.

What then, should Liberal leader Brad Battin do about the Moira Deeming problem?

There is no shortage of advice. Some colleagues want him to bend the knee to Charles Goode, an octogenarian stockbroker who, as Cormack Foundation chairman, sits Smaug-like on its $110 million corpus, and plead for the foundation to cover Pesutto’s costs.

Others say the money should come from the party itself, given Pesutto was sued for things he said while leading it.

Battin’s instinct is to do nothing. Earlier this week, one of his MPs, Brad Rowswell, requested a party room meeting to discuss Pesutto’s impending bankruptcy and the prospects of a byelection in Hawthorn. Battin made it clear that he wanted to keep talking about machete bans and cuts to stamp duty – not an internal party dispute.

This was before news broke in Wednesday’s The Australian about Deeming’s legal gambit to make former premiers Jeff Kennett, Ted Baillieu and Denis Napthine and Liberal colleagues Georgie Crozier and David Southwick pay for Pesutto’s sins.

A Federal Court will ultimately decide whether this is a Hail Mary by Deeming’s lawyers or a new hell for a party that has lost six of the past seven Victorian state elections.

Battin believes that Pesutto’s predicament is self-made and is not convinced the party should bail out a former leader who slandered one of his own colleagues. He also knows that if the party helps Pesutto to spare the others, Deeming will see it as a betrayal.

As Cyclone Moira approaches, he is hoping to ride out the storm.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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