By Michael Bachelard and Sumeyya Ilanbey
When Liberal Party leader John Pesutto met freshly minted west-suburban MP Moira Deeming in his Spring Street office at 5pm last Sunday, she was exhausted from her exertions the previous day at an anti-trans rights protest on the steps of parliament, and he was in no mood to compromise.
The meeting did not go well.
Pesutto, with his leadership team of David Southwick, Georgie Crozier and Matt Bach, gave Deeming three options, according to a source at the meeting speaking confidentially to discuss internal party matters. Deeming could either resign from the party or be expelled, if she did not publicly denounce the speakers she’d joined on stage at the rally, particularly Melbourne anti-trans activist Angie Jones, British campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, and failed federal Liberal candidate Katherine Deves.
Pesutto also questioned Deeming on why she did not immediately denounce the neo-Nazis who had marched in, wearing bucket hats and balaclavas, and performed Hitler salutes on the steps of parliament. The leadership team believed the upper house MP was not contrite, nor did she understand the gravity of the situation. Sources close to Deeming says she had, in fact, posted on Twitter condemning the neo-Nazis, and after much begging, convinced Keen-Minshull to do the same. The activist thought it was “degrading” to assume she would need to denounce Nazis who she did not support.
Sources at the meeting say Deeming told her party leader she had not known the black-clad men were neo-Nazis and did not see why she should apologise for her stance on transgender issues, or being in the company of Keen-Minshull, Jones and Deves. There was nothing she had ever seen to suggest they were far-right extremists. Victoria’s trans laws were extreme, she said, and she should have the freedom to express her views about them.
Moira Deeming (left) in a video posted to YouTube by UK-based activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, centre, with Katherine Deves after the March 18 rally.Credit: Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull
She has never made a secret of those views, and her supporters have noted she was heavily vetted during the preselection process. They say federal Liberal senator Claire Chandler has championed the same cause without problem, and remind colleagues she had pledged to campaign for sex-based rights of women and children in the Victorian Parliament.
“They didn’t want me speaking about women’s rights,” Deeming complained to friends later.
Pesutto told colleagues: “We tried to get her to see sense, but she did the opposite and doubled down.”
Emerging from the meeting, the party leader felt he had no choice. But Deeming believed she had until Tuesday to broker a deal. Instead, that night Pesutto issued a statement announcing he would move to expel her, and on Tuesday he circulated a 15-page “dossier” of evidence that he felt proved protest organiser Keen-Minshull was “publicly associated with far right-wing extremist groups including neo-Nazi activists” and Jones had sent out a highly offensive tweet.
Keen-Minshull has denied having links to neo-Nazis, and Deeming has condemned the men who performed Nazi salutes during the rally.
Opposition Leader John Pesutto answers questions on March 20 about his move to expel Deeming from the parliamentary Liberal Party, flanked by (from left) David Southwick, Georgie Crozier and Matt Bach.Credit: Simon Schluter
On Monday at 10am Pesutto will push to eject the upper house member from the parliamentary Liberal Party – a vote she and her allies will oppose.
Some in the party are billing the vote as a test of Pesutto’s fledgling leadership. But Pesutto sees it as something else: a chance for his party to fundamentally change its outlook and public messaging, so it can become “a voice for everybody” and an alternative government by the 2026 election.
In that sense, Resolve Strategic pollster Jim Reed says Deeming is a gift to him.
“As a new leader it’s easy to talk ... but difficult to have concrete actions to say ‘This is what I’m against, these are my values’,” Reed says. “At a cost to Pesutto, he’s quite clearly saying ‘this is not us’.”
From the trans community’s perspective, it’s sad that it took a violent protest, offensive language, a Hitler salute and some neo-Nazis for Pesutto to get his point across.
But rank-and-file members are furious with Pesutto, and have emailed MPs all week cautioning against expelling Deeming, and threatening to quit their Liberal Party memberships if she is dumped from the parliamentary ranks.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
Deeming was always going to cause trouble for the Liberal Party.
In July last year, when she was preselected to contest the Western Metropolitan seat in the state’s upper house, it was her second attempt to find a place in parliament. The first had been a few months earlier, in March, when the state party’s administrative committee voted for her to run in the federal seat of Gorton.
Before she could be officially endorsed, a senior official chimed in with the news that then prime minister Scott Morrison’s office did not want her on the team. Just one week before Morrison’s disastrous captain’s pick of anti-trans activist Katherine Deves to run for the seat of Warringah, his office thought Deeming was too radical. Negative media coverage of her social views, including her opposition to vaccine mandates, would distract from his campaign, Morrison’s office said.
Deeming insists she advocates respectfully for her views. But in a 2020 article in The Spectator she likened those pushing for greater trans rights to the Spanish Inquisition, saying activists wanted “to crush and terrify any intellectual dissent” employing “modern-day torture techniques”, including the “terrifying threat of removing one’s children”. Their end, she wrote, was “the total decimation of women’s, men’s, children’s and parent’s rights in law”.
Deeming has insisted while she respects the rights of transgender people, there needs to be a better way at balancing them with the sex-based rights of women.
Also that year she campaigned against elements of Safe Schools, a sex education program formulated to train teachers in how to support LGBTQ+ students. She described components as “blatant sexual harassment” and “a Trojan horse designed to promote and encourage [the organisers’] hyper-sexualised view of school students’ sex lives”.
And in her first speech in the new parliament last month, Deeming focused heavily on the transgender debate, as well as the sex-based rights of women and children, calling on the government to define what a female is and “reinstate common sense and compassion and to conduct an open inquiry into gender affirmation practices in Victoria”.
The circumstances under which children are allowed into legal brothels meant, she said, that “Victoria will now inevitably become the child rape capital of Australia”. Deeming has argued she has also championed other causes, and that she isn’t a single-issue MP.
Debate without dehumanisation
The Liberal Party, as John Howard used to say, is a broad church. A number of members of Pesutto’s party room who oppose the push to expel Deeming say she reflects the real beliefs of her constituents, which “must be represented in parliament”.
“People are shaped by their experiences. We should have people in the parliament with those views,” said one MP who will oppose the expulsion motion on Monday.
Others say expelling her goes against bedrock Liberal philosophy. One influential party member, speaking anonymously, said: “Party members believe in free speech, freedom of thought and conscience, family values and protecting the family unit.
“By and large the party membership is conservative. Almost all are Sky after dark watchers,” this activist said. Going down the path outlined by Pesutto “would change the whole philosophy of the party”.
Pesutto is taking the gamble of expelling Deeming because a changed party is precisely what he wants.
He lost his previously safe seat of Hawthorn to Labor at the 2018 election after the party ran a disastrous campaign focusing on a so-called “African gangs” crisis and saying “only the Liberals will stop gangs hunting in packs”.
He won his seat back in 2022, but the party suffered a second humiliating rout, having again sent smoke signals to the far-right vote. Guy allowed his MPs to attend “Freedom” rallies on the steps of parliament even after a gallows appeared there and protesters chanted “Hang Dan Andrews”. One Liberal election advertisement said: “Remember when Andrews forced us to get the jab or lose our job? Now even our own unions are admitting he’s a prick.”
“I’m setting out a new direction,” Pesutto said on Thursday in an interview with The Age. “I’m determined to lead a Liberal Party that is modern, it’s contemporary, it’s mainstream, it’s inclusive and welcoming of everyone.”
In the words of one pollster, Kos Samaras: “It’s a long road back.”
Pesutto cites moderate Liberal premiers Rupert Hamer, Jeff Kennett and Ted Baillieu, saying the party had a long history of finding the balance between strong economic management and “being on the social side very welcoming and inclusive”.
On family values, he said, “it’s well within the wide range of views that people in the Liberal Party have that families can take different forms”.
Party members have criticised Pesutto on free speech grounds. One-time Liberal leadership contender Ryan Smith told ABC Radio: “I can’t see any evidence that [Deeming] is associated with Nazis … some of the evidence that’s been shown to me appears to have been put together to fit the accusation rather than the other way around.”
Pesutto agreed that without freedom of speech “we don’t live in a democracy”. He wanted a political debate over gender issues but one that is “respectful, courteous and civil”, adding: “We can debate issues without demonising each other.”
Premier Daniel Andrews has literally nailed his colours to the mast on this issue: in the wake of the neo-Nazi incursion at parliament he hoisted the transgender flag in the parliamentary precinct as well as moving to ban the Nazi salute.
Samaras, a former Labor operative now running political research group RedBridge, says his work suggests 90 per cent of Australians or more are generally accepting of the rainbow community. Andrews understands that, he says, and “every time the Liberals go there, people just think they’re weirdos”.
Politically speaking, the events of the past week have given Pesutto an opportunity – as tough as it is – to send a signal to his own party membership, his parliamentary colleagues and the public: there’s a new sheriff in town.
The gender debate
Deeming and her views, however, will not go away. If she does end up on the backbench, she will be freed of any party constraint in raising the issues that drive her. For now, those include the rights of transgender people and those who would like to transition: the laws that cover their medical and social treatment, and which sporting teams, change rooms, refuges, prisons and toilets they have access to.
She’s far from alone. Women – many of them middle-aged feminists – like those who attended the rally last weekend genuinely fear the push for trans rights has gone too far and risks historical gains made by women to protect the safety and sanctity of women-only spaces.
One of the key anxieties is that inclusive language is erasing their particular identity with terms such as “assigned female at birth” or “people with vaginas” or “people who menstruate” instead of the word woman, and chestfeeding instead of breastfeeding.
There are precious few things that Deeming and Keen-Minshull would agree on with those protesting against them on the other side of Spring Street last Saturday – but one thing is common ground: there is a significant social change underway and some are struggling to keep up.
From a trickle a decade ago, hundreds of people – many of them very young – are now turning up at the Royal Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic wanting treatment for being trans and gender diverse. Few families across middle Melbourne would not know somebody whose child is non-binary, gender-fluid or transgender, and for some that’s unsettling and a source of anxiety.
Son Vivienne, the CEO of Transgender Victoria, says people have always experienced gender in a variety of ways, but the recent easing of social stigma has taken the lid off the expression of this. Vivienne makes a plea to those who are fearful or hateful: “We exist. And we have a right to be well and engaged in society like everyone else.”
Of Deeming’s actions, Vivienne says: “You can’t just hang with the haters and then claim that you’re neutral.”
They agree that the issues around sport and the transition of children are difficult for some. On sport, they say there’s a “massive difference between community levels of sport and engagement and elite sport”.
At the elite level, different sports are working out their own protocols – swimming last year agreed to restrict the participation of transgender athletes in elite women’s competitions and to create a working group to establish an “open” category for them. At the community level, “codes have been working out how to balance the natural advantages of size/weight and strength for years and years”, Vivienne says. “At the community level [gender] hardly matters.”
Trans rights activists demonstrating at Parliament House in Canberra on March 23.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
On children, they say transitioning is “not nearly as easy as it’s made out to be – it’s highly scrutinised and highly controlled” and usually takes years. Stage one involves medication to block or pause puberty development.
Samaras says the importance of these issues to the community is often overblown by politicians. In his focus groups people do not spontaneously raise the issue, and when prompted, he says, they simply do not seek a political debate. It’s a private matter between a family and their doctor, they say.
Vivienne, though, does want a political discussion (not a debate – “every debate becomes toxic”) on some issues. One is more funding for gender-affirming care. Another is to more clearly outlaw vilification of transgender people.
“It’s not clear why the police were protecting a space for Nazis and pepper-spraying queers,” they say. “The parliament should weigh in on that. At state or federal levels you can’t use the N-word, but can use gender-oriented slurs. It’s confusing.”
At the pro-trans rally police arrested three people in their 20s, two for assaulting police and one for assault. They did not answer further questions about vilification, saying in a statement: “Everyone has the right to protest lawfully.”
There will be a time for the discussion envisaged by John Pesutto on some of these issues, Vivienne says. “But when they’re in crisis mode and Nazis are on the parliament steps, well, nothing good will come out of that.”
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