Between email discovery and MP cross-examination, the Deeming case just gets weirder

Renee Heath may be the only MP to have ever given testimony against her own leader in a case brought by another member of their party.

MP Renee Heath arrives at the Melbourne federal court as the defamation battle continues between Moira Deeming and Victoria Liberal Leader John Pesutto. Picture: Aaron Francis

It’s almost hard to imagine in a case which has already featured Nazis, anti-trans activists and secretly recorded meetings of the Liberal Party leadership team, but on Friday afternoon things got even weirder.

That’s because the first witness after lunch was Renee Heath, who like Moira Deeming is still a member of Liberal Party, but who unlike Deeming is also a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party as well.

And since Heath has made an affidavit on behalf of her expelled colleague, it meant we were treated to the weird spectacle of a Liberal MP being cross-examined by a barrister acting on behalf of their leader.

Rare sport indeed.

Readers should feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think in fact Renee Heath may be the only MP to have ever given testimony against her own leader in a case brought by another member of their party.

Perhaps the historic nature of the occasion explained her demeanour.

For unlike Deeming, who gave the impression she’d rather have been anywhere else, Heath seemed happy – thrilled even – to be testifying in federal court defamation proceedings.

Sadly for the Victorian Liberal Party, while Heath’s place in our political history as the first such witness is secure, she won’t be special for long.

The next two weeks will see a procession of Liberal MPs testifying for and against their leader.

As for her testimony itself, the best to be said is she came ready to mix it up.

So by my rough estimate for very every six “I don’t recalls,” she alternated the occasional ”I don’t recall, sorry” and the odd request to repeat the question.

John Pesutto today with his barrister Matthew Collins KC. Picture: Aaron Francis

The substantial point that Pesutto’s barrister Matt Collins appeared trying to extract was that Heath had been somewhat tricky in her decision to email her notes of the party room meeting that suspended Deeming to her Gmail account before forwarding them to Deeming, something she had been told not to do.

Collins put it to her that she had done this so that there would be no record on the parliamentary email system.

This is not the first time Collins has been troubled the way MPs send some communications from private and others from parliamentary accounts, with the unstated implication being it’s a sign something is not quite right.

The thing is however, that as can be seen from this case, as a tactic to avoid scrutiny, it clearly has its limitations because for the purpose of defamation proceedings Gmail accounts are just as discoverable as parliamentary email accounts.

And in case you were wondering, there’s no need to use private accounts to get around the Freedom of Information laws either, since parliament’s email system is beyond that law’s reach.

Moira Deeming with her barrister Sue Chrysanthou SC. Picture: Aaron Francis

The only reason I can think why an MP would use one rather than the other is not to escape the eyes of the law, but to escape the eyes of their staff who usually have access to their official email.

In this case it turns out that Heath did indeed forget to discover she had in fact emailed her notes of the party meeting to Deeming, something she said was an oversight.

We’ll have to wait and see of course what Collins makes of this oversight.

I think we can predict with some certainly however that it will be as nothing to the fuss Deeming’s silk, Sue Chrysanthou, is going to make of Pesutto’s failure to mention until the week before this trial opened that since last December he had been aware of the existence of a secret recording of the March 2023 meeting between Deeming and the leadership group.