By Rachel Eddie and Annika Smethurst
Victorian Opposition Leader John Pesutto is expected to testify in the defamation trial against him on Tuesday, after a colleague accused him on Monday of privately saying Moira Deeming had organised neo-Nazis to attend a rally last year.
Kim Wells, the Rowville local member and former treasurer, also accused the party leadership team of double-crossing Deeming and her partyroom backers and engaging in a pile-on.
Opposition Leader John Pesutto and wife Betty arriving at the Federal Court. on Monday.Credit: Simon Schluter
In a heated exchange in the Federal Court defamation case Deeming has launched, Wells said Pesutto called him the night after the March 18, 2023, Let Women Speak rally to tell him he was moving to expel Deeming.
Wells testified Pesutto told him in that phone call that Deeming had organised neo-Nazis to attend the rally.
Pesutto’s barrister, Matthew Collins, KC, put to Wells that his recollection of the conversation was “quite flawed”.
“You would be incorrect,” Wells replied.
Kim Wells outside the Federal Court.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Wells said he phoned Deeming the next morning and told her about the conversation.
“You knew when you said that to Mrs Deeming it was false,” Collins put to him. “You knew he never said that.”
“Incorrect,” Wells replied.
Wells accepted he never heard Pesutto make this claim again.
Deeming helped organise the Let Women Speak rally held on the steps of the Victorian Parliament. Neo-Nazis were among several groups of protesters that arrived that day.
Pesutto pushed to have Deeming expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party in the days after the rally. She was suspended instead for nine months in a last-minute compromise, but was expelled weeks later after threatening to bring in lawyers.
She alleges Pesutto defamed her as a Nazi sympathiser, which he rejects.
Last week the court was played a 70-minute clandestine recording of a meeting between the leadership team and Deeming the day after the rally.
Deeming, Pesutto, deputy Liberal leader David Southwick, upper house leader Georgie Crozier, then-upper house deputy leader Matt Bach, and Pesutto’s then-chief of staff, Rodrigo Pintos-Lopez, were all present.
Moira Deeming outside court on Monday.Credit: Simon Schluter
Wells agreed he had accepted Deeming’s version of how the meeting unfolded and had never asked any of the others for their version of events.
“I spoke to Mrs Deeming about the pile-on at the meeting,” he said.
Wells said Southwick had asked him to mentor Deeming and agreed he worked as a conduit during negotiations over the expulsion motion.
He claimed that those negotiating on behalf of Deeming had been double-crossed at a March 27, 2023, meeting in which the suspension compromise was reached. He said this compromise was to save Pesutto’s leadership.
Pesutto’s office released a statement on Deeming’s behalf after the meeting, but the court heard there was confusion over whether the joint statement should have also had comments from Pesutto exonerating Deeming.
Wells claimed there was no confusion and the agreement was clear. He said he had been told Deeming would receive a full exoneration but accepted this was not written into the motion the party room agreed to.
“We knew we’d been double-crossed.”
Wells’ explosive evidence will test party stability, as will members of Pesutto’s shadow cabinet giving evidence against their leader. Pesutto is expected to testify on Tuesday.
Opposition frontbencher Richard Riordan said in his affidavit to the court, released on Monday, that Southwick told him on the phone on March 19, 2023: “We have a problem. Moira has organised a Nazi event. She’s been hanging out with Nazis and partying with them. We’ve documented it all. We have all the evidence. We’re going to move to get rid of her.”
On Friday, Riordan agreed Southwick, who is Jewish, took such allegations very seriously. He said he did not have a good recollection of the time because of a “frenzy” of phone calls.
Riordan, Wells and fellow MPs Renee Heath, David Hodgett and Joe McCracken, who wrote affidavits for Deeming, all accepted they did not check the evidence in a dossier justifying Deeming’s expulsion or said they could not recall doing so.
Collins, Pesutto’s lawyer, in his cross-examination of McCracken on Monday, put to him that seeing footage of someone referencing Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf at a rally in the UK would be the kind of thing you would remember.
Hodgett told the court he was inundated with about 100 emails from the public and estimated about 97 per cent of them were anti-Pesutto rather than anti-Deeming.
“The vast majority were critical of Mr Pesutto and a small percentage were critical of Mrs Deeming,” Hodgett said.
He said that to his knowledge, Pesutto had never said Deeming was a Nazi, Nazi sympathiser or associated with Nazis.
Former MP Ryan Smith also said he had not clicked through the evidence in the dossier justifying the push to expel Deeming.
Smith told the court the 2022 expulsion of Bernie Finn under then-opposition leader Matthew Guy was different because he had a “long history” of indiscretions. Guy had also made public his view that Finn should be expelled before the party room vote.
The case continues.
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