James Campbell: For once it really will come down to the vibe of the thing

That well-known Australian legal principle – the vibe of the thing – will be a crucial element to the defamation trial and already we’ve had one Denis Denuto test.

Day four of Deeming versus Pesutto saw the opposition leader’s counsel Matt Collins explore the differences between the ousted Liberal backbencher’s account of her meeting last March with the state parliamentary party leaders and the recording which was played to the court on Tuesday.

Once this got underway it quickly became clear that Justice David O’Callaghan is going to have to decide whether the discrepancies between that recording and Deeming’s statement render her account worthless or whether despite those shortcomings that statement is basically a fair account of the meeting.

In other words, exciting, because for once it really will come down to that well-known Australian legal principle, the vibe of the thing.

But first Collins teased us with the prospect of another secret Liberal recording!

Ousted Liberal backbencher Moira Deeming and her barrister Sue Chrysanthou arriving at court. Picture: David Crosling

Apparently in early February last year – ahead of the fateful Let Women Speak rally – Deeming met with Pesutto and Liberal upper house leader Georgie Crozier,

This time she had been the one who had the recorder secretly going.

Why had she done so?

“I didn’t think I would be able to remember the meeting properly and my husband was going to ask questions about it,” she explained.

What went down at this meeting?

Alas Collins kept us dangling.

John Pesutto is being sued by Moira Deeming for defamation. Picture: David Crosling

Will we eventually get to hear this or will it remain a hidden gem, like the Beatles’ unreleased Carnival of Light, which has tantalised fans for more than 50 years?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Collins then moved on to what happened at her fateful meeting with the leadership group.

But not before asking if she had taped this meeting too.

Her reply was a slow ‘no’ that left the listener in no doubt that she wished that she had.

Collins began by taking to the claim in her affidavit that Pesutto had told her if she wanted to advocate for fringe issues like sex-based rights he and the leadership team were of the view she would be better suited to being an independent rather than a Liberal MP.

If we are to apply the Dennis Denuto test, this would clearly pass – Pesutto did indeed suggest in the meeting she might be better off pursuing all this trans stuff as an independent.

But Collins seemed more interested in the fact he had never used the word ‘fringe’ even though Deeming conceded he had not used the words that she had used.

Micheal Caton as Darryl Kerrigan and Tiriel Mora as Dennis Denuto in The Castle.

Collins then read a quote from Pesutto in the meeting which sums up that statesman’s modernising mission: “I’ve very much – and you would have heard this over interviews over recent weeks and the last few months – is try to position the party so that whoever you are, whether your hetero, whether your same-sex attracted, whether you are trans, whoever you are, the Liberal Party can be a voice for you because the values of the party apply to anybody, no matter who you are because it’s about enterprise, it’s about the rule of law, strength of communities, personal effort, those sorts of things”.

It was a perfect statement of the Pesutto project, beautifully expressed: the man doesn’t just want to govern for Hawthorn but Prahran, Fitzroy and Clifton Hill as well.

Collins however was concerned that nowhere in the transcript had anyone said ‘modernise’.

Luckily Sue Chrysanthou was soon on her feet objecting to His Honour that if he was going to keep going with this stuff it was going to be a very long morning indeed.

Without quite agreeing, His Honour managed to suggest Collins knock it off. Which he did.

Which was a pity really because from the audience’s point of view it was the most entertaining part of the day, much of the rest of which was taken up with questions of when Deeming had seen or become aware of the footage of the meeting.

In the afternoon he moved onto the circumstances of the meeting that later that week in March last year that saw Deeming suspended during which she admitted she had leaked a number of things to the media.

By now even she was growing weary of the prospect of going through her actions point by point and in answer to Collins’ query about whether she had leaked one piece of correspondence, to save the court time she conceded she had leaked the lot.

The trial continues

Originally published as James Campbell: For once it really will come down to the vibe of the thing