Peta Credlin: Victorian Liberal Party leader John Pesutto will be spilled in early 2025

The only reason John Pesutto wasn’t toppled as leader today is because the contemptible cabal of MPs who no longer support him can’t yet decide which of them gets the top job.

Those decent Liberals who watched John Pesutto’s slippery and dishonourable performance today would be shaking their heads in a mix of anger and dismay.

How can anyone claiming to have integrity, let alone to be a credible alternative premier, comprehensively lose a defamation case – and not just fail to apologise to the person he’s defamed, but insist on continuing to exclude her from the party room even though a judge has ruled that her original expulsion was based on a lie?

The only winner here is Jacinta Allan for whom Christmas has come early.

John Pesutto speaking to the media after the vote on Friday. Picture: Wayne Taylor

It’s hard not to despair of the Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party.

They’ve been out of office for 21 of the past 25 years; they’ve never offered a clear alternative to an increasingly green left and now obviously inept Labor Party; most of the bad laws crippling Victoria they haven’t opposed and won’t overturn; for much of the past decade they’ve been intimidated by former premier Daniel Andrews; and today, with the party room deadlocked 14-14 on a motion to readmit Moira Deeming, Pesutto then used his casting vote to continue her exile.

Even how he voted is rotten given he voted once in the original 14 and then again with his casting vote.

How unfair is that: Pesutto gets to vote twice and Deeming – who, based on a court’s findings, should never have been expelled in the first place – doesn’t get a vote at all?

Almost as contemptible as Pesutto is the self-indulgent cabal of MPs who no longer support Pesutto but voted with him today to give them more time to marshal the numbers to grab the leadership in the impending spill.

And I mean impending because it will come early next year.

Indeed, the only reason it didn’t happen today is that they can’t decide which of them gets the top job.

Moira Deeming leaves the Federal Court after her defamation win. Picture: David Crosling

This has long been the cancer within the Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party: MPs fighting over the thin spoils of opposition rather than crafting comprehensive policies to improve the state of the state.

What a weak, craven group they are.

Most would struggle to get a job in the real world where refusing to accept the judgment of a court would be a corporate career-ender.

All credit though to the 14 MPs who did vote to readmit Deeming because they know right from wrong and certainly understand where the vast bulk of party members stand on this issue.

Remember, Deeming remains a much-respected Liberal Party member.

Pesutto and his cronies would like to throw her out of the wider party too but can’t because that would require a vote of the rank and file. In these topsy-turvy woke times, it’s the ordinary party volunteers who cheer her defence of women and girls (and parents) and their rights to single-sex spaces and sport.

So where are we now? A broken state in desperate need of an adult opposition to hold the bad government to account has been let down again.

Pesutto is a ‘dead man walking’ who’s destroyed his own credibility as a potential premier; and instead of being an effective opposition, the Libs can’t agree on what they stand for or even whether to make amends to a clearly wronged woman.

Meanwhile donors are on strike and fed-up party members are resigning in droves.

This would be bad enough if it only impacted on Victoria.

But given that Peter Dutton needs to win up to five seats here if he’s to become PM, the shameful state of the local Liberal Party is damaging the whole country.