Civil case in an uncivil war: Liberal Party’s bitter feud laid bare

For a man facing two fights – one legal and the other political – Opposition Leader John Pesutto has an uncanny ability to appear composed.

Maybe that’s because Pesutto, 54, is accustomed to getting knocked down and fighting on. His career has been beset by more political setbacks than most.

He only fulfilled his long-held ambition to represent the Victorian Liberal Party in parliament in 2014 after several preselection losses.

Then he watched his parliamentary career cut short – live on the ABC’s election night panel – when he lost his inner-Melbourne seat of Hawthorn in 2018, ominously telling viewers he didn’t make the defeat about him. “If we continue to make it about us, that’s when you run into problems like this.”

Opposition Leader John Pesutto with wife Betty arriving at court on Wednesday.Credit: Jason South

Winning back Hawthorn against teal and Labor threats in November 2022, he went on to win a ballot for the party’s leadership by just one vote in December that year.

But within three months, Pesutto’s future leading the party was thrown into doubt when he made the fateful decision to push for the expulsion of upper house MP Moira Deeming after the Let Women Speak rally on March 18, 2023. Neo-Nazis were among several groups of protesters that arrived that day.

Deeming was also new to parliament that year, having been elected to take the upper house spot of conservative MP Bernie Finn, who had earlier been booted from the parliamentary team.

A conservative, Deeming received crucial support from a block of moderates, which put her in the winning position on the upper house ticket after she was rejected as a candidate for the federal seat of Gorton.

Deeming arrived at the Federal Court throughout this week with an air of self-assurance, often dressed in purple – a colour associated with the suffragette movement – while positioning herself in evidence as a “run-of-the-mill, middle-aged mum from the suburbs”.

Moira Deeming (right) and her barrister, Sue Chrysanthou, arrive at court on Wednesday.Credit: Jason South

In this high-stakes legal battle, Justice David O’Callaghan is being asked to decide whether Pesutto defamed Deeming as a Nazi sympathiser. Pesutto is fighting this claim.

Aside from a civil suit, the case is playing out as a political soap opera, with courtroom 6K trying to make sense of the terms TERFs and pedos, invoking the memory of Robert Menzies and disputing the origins of the Frederick Loewe show tune Almost Like Being in Love – and that was all within the first two days.

One MP had privately joked with The Age about which handsome actors they hoped would play them in the television drama. Another said following the trial on YouTube was like watching Days of Our Lives.

In private correspondence obtained by The Age, Deeming told UK activist Kellie-Jay Keen she had taken her advice to “glam the f--- up”. “Use your beauty to our advantage, it will protect you on the days you feel like crap, and it will drive men who want to bring you down crazy. Plus looking like a goddess will make you media friendly!” Keen replied through the social media site X.

Under cross-examination, Deeming admitted to helping Keen organise the Let Women Speak rally on the steps of the Victorian parliament. Neo-Nazis attended the event and performed the salute, which Deeming said she had only seen as they were being escorted away by the police.

Nor did she want to assume people dressed in black and doing a salute were neo-Nazis, she told the court.

Deeming said she “needed to be very, very careful before I made that accusation” – that the men were neo-Nazis – because it was the most serious thing she could accuse someone of.

Deeming’s barrister Sue Chrysanthou, SC, is seeking to convince Justice O’Callaghan her client was unfairly “tarred with the Nazi brush”, contending that the masked men in black were an entirely separate group and that actually undermined the rally Deeming helped organise.

While Justice O’Callaghan will be the final arbiter in the legal case, away from William Street, the dispute has divided Liberal MPs and the broader membership and fuelled a broader factional dispute about the direction of the party, free speech and whether the party remains a broad church.

That title of a “broad church” is gone, according to Chrysanthou.

On Tuesday, the court was treated to a secretly recorded 70-minute audio recording, unearthed from deputy leader David Southwick’s phone, which pulled back the curtain on a crucial meeting between the Liberal Party’s leadership and Deeming the day after the controversial rally.

It’s unclear whether the audio will ultimately assist Deeming or Pesutto when it comes to the final verdict, but Chrysanthou contended it was proof of a “pile on” by the Liberal leadership team who she argues were worried about her obsession with “sex-based rights”.

She was never given a chance despite repeatedly condemning Nazism, Chrysanthou submitted. “What they’re doing throughout this meeting is changing the goal posts,” Chrysanthou told the court.

Even some MPs who don’t necessarily share Deeming’s controversial views on trans and gender-diverse people, there are many who believe she was denied natural justice when the leadership sought her expulsion in March 2023.

“Very obviously, I’m not a Nazi,” Deeming said in the recorded March 19, 2023, meeting.

Her strongest backers over the past 18 months have mainly come from the party’s conservative right flank as well as conservative media that have bombarded Pesutto. Deeming described Sky News host Peta Credlin as a “mentor” in court.

To Pesutto, Deeming had unwittingly handed his political opponents a powerful weapon.

“They have been itching for something to clobber me with and this is it,” Pesutto was heard saying on the recording of the meeting.

“[Nazism] is like the most toxic acid that can run through any political party, and it’s running through us.”

The clandestine recording lifted the lid on backroom talks between the leadership team and spells out how Pesutto wanted to position the Victorian Liberal Party and be electable for 2026.

“So that no matter who you are, whether you are hetero, whether you are 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,” Pesutto told Deeming in the meeting.

“Because it’s about enterprise, it’s about the rule of law, strength of communities. It’s about individual effort and those sorts of things. So I’ve been working very hard to do that. What happened yesterday in terms of the protests, I want to address that and what that means for our ability to prosecute that broader case.”

The audio exposed Pesutto’s fears that the government and teal opponents would exploit the incident and “clobber” him with it.

“Labor’s got it, I’m pretty sure the Greens would have it, the Teals will have it.”

Don’t worry, Deeming said in the audio recording of the March 19 meeting, she’d already threatened to sue the media over their coverage of her maiden speech in which she slammed “equality taken to extremes”. “They haven’t said a single thing about me since then.”

Key to her argument, Chrysanthou has attempted to convince Justice O’Callaghan that the leadership team was set on removing Deeming because of her passion for “sex-based rights”, an issue she had campaigned on as a City of Melton councillor and had contributed to the party’s decision to prevent her running as a candidate at the federal election.

In her previous role, as a teacher, Deeming had rallied against the Safe Schools anti-bullying program, which she this week claimed in court was authored by “paedophile apologists”.

Deeming’s husband, Andrew, said in his affidavit that she felt the push to expel her was “a large-scale coordinated attack on her”.

Pesutto’s appeal to Deeming about his vision for the party might not sound controversial, but is indicative of the Victorian Liberal Party’s identity crisis after consecutive wipeout elections, as it also tries to grapple with an ageing membership and teal threats.

Dr Matthew Collins, KC, for Pesutto, in his cross-examination portrayed Deeming as being reckless to the seriousness of what had unfolded outside parliament 18 months ago.

Even once Deeming had seen the Nazi salute, watched video footage of it, and received a phone call from deputy Liberal leader David Southwick instructing her to urgently release a statement severing herself from them, she told the court she wasn’t yet certain those masked men in black were legitimate Nazis. And in any case, she did not know she was allowed to put out a statement as a backbench MP and she did not have the Liberal Party’s template to do so.

She should have checked the record of the organisers including Keen, who had spoken alongside a member of far-right group the Proud Boys at a rally in the US, beforehand, Collins submitted.

Instead, Deeming went on to drink champagne on the night of the rally with people who continued to question whether the Neo-nazis were members of Victoria Police of trans-right activists in disguise.

Shadow minister Richard Riordan outside the Federal Court on Friday.Credit: Jason South

Deeming later accepted the people dressed in black were Neo-nazis and said she was horrified by them. “I condemned their Nazi salute … I just needed to be sure before I actually said they were self-confessed Nazis.”

Thomas Sewell, the self-appointed leader of the National Socialist Network, claimed he and the other neo-Nazis were acting as a “vanguard” to “protect” the rally. Deeming also rejects this.

Beyond the tarring effect of the so-called Nazi brush, the case also aired the dirty laundry of the broader Victorian Liberal Party over the week. Under oath, Deeming told the court her colleague James Newbury’s public declaration he opposed duck hunting had threatened to break up the coalition.

She also gave a differing view of her relationship with colleague Renee Heath, saying she didn’t consider her a close friend. When Collins put the same proposition to Heath on Friday, she insisted their friendship was indeed close.

Heath was also grilled about her role in the saga, admitting she had sent draft minutes of a crucial party room meeting to colleagues Chris Crewther, Nick McGowan and Deeming, but maintained she did not know who could have leaked the notes to Sky News.

Liberal MP Renee Heath arrives at the Federal Court on Friday.Credit: Jason South

The mudslinging continued into the afternoon when Liberal frontbencher Richard Riordan took the stand to detail the “frenzy” triggered by the expulsion and accusing Southwick of leaving him with the impression that Deeming had organised an event linked to neo-Nazis.

Collins sought to remind Riordan of Finn’s expulsion when then-opposition leader Matthew Guy declared he would have Finn removed from the parliamentary team before it went to a vote. Riordan couldn’t recall the timing, but it served as a reminder that the benches in parliament are no ordinary workplace and the Federal Court is not presiding over an alleged wrongful dismissal.

The Labor government has also done its best to ensure the drama remains in the news, arranging their daily press conferences outside of court hours and in locations with easy access to the Federal Court.

In a sign of festering hostilities, Pesutto did not look at his cabinet member Riordan or his MP Heath as they gave evidence on Friday raising questions about how the party will recover.

However Justice O’Callaghan takes the evidence, the Liberal parliamentary party will have its own judgments to make.

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