The Moira Deeming saga now playing out in the Federal Court, in her defamation action against state Liberal leader John Pesutto, is essentially about the long-term gutlessness of the Victorian Liberal parliamentary team.
To Pesutto, Deeming’s real crime is not that she was at a rally gatecrashed by neo-Nazis but that she’s a conservative. That’s why he wanted her gone.
Yet if outspoken conservatives have no place in the Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party, why would any conservative vote for them?
Remember, Deeming is suing Pesutto because to have her expelled from the state Liberal partyroom she claims he described her as an associate of Nazi sympathisers (his descriptor of feminist activists Angie Jones and Kellie-Jay Keen).
Of course Pesutto is now trying to walk all that back, but he’s not helped by the existence of a secret recording from a meeting where this is pretty much said, and the fact he settled out of court with a public apology to Jones and Keen.
What has become clear, though, after a week and a half of hearings is that Pesutto’s antipathy towards Deeming was never about who gatecrashed the rally in March last year. Rather, his real purpose in seeking to remove Deeming was to purge the parliamentary party of a strong conservative woman.
First, because he feared her presence would expose him to criticism in his own ultra-marginal, teal-like seat, because he has misread the fight for women’s rights as a left v right issue when it unites women (and men) across the political spectrum. And, second, because he feared he couldn’t stand up to premier Daniel Andrews’ charge that the Libs were guilty by association with neo-Nazis just because Deeming had been at the gatecrashed rally.
In other words, this whole expensive and drawn-out exercise in washing the party’s dirty linen in public was triggered by Pesutto’s fear of being portrayed as too right wing to govern Victoria; indeed, it’s something he specifically references in the secret recording.
It’s a classic case of allowing your opponents to dictate your actions. And yet another example of the Victorian Liberals being so utterly spooked by Andrews that they end up looking politically paralysed and, frankly, pathetic.
For the record, I should state that before this Deeming row I regarded Pesutto as one of their few viable options to lead a depleted Liberal parliamentary team into the next election. Indeed, earlier I’d been asked to help him to develop a strong opposition leader’s office and a credible political program, which I did.
But when he maligned Deeming as guilty by association and failed to defend the rights of women, he lost me; and, as I’ve made public, I felt compelled to defend the underdog in Deeming.
Since that time, I’ve worked with various party intermediaries to encourage both Pesutto and Deeming to avoid going to court as defamation trials rarely have a winner and this unedifying display we’re witnessing now is the last thing Victorians need when they’re crying out for a change of government.
But, in the end, it’s the leader who has the fundamental responsibility to keep the team together. For 18 months now, Pesutto has defended his original decision to expel Deeming as an alleged neo-Nazi associate on the grounds that to retreat would make him seem weak.
In fact, admitting to an initial over-reaction would more likely have made him seem the bigger man. What’s now set to damn his leadership is that these two serious errors of judgment – first, making a big mistake; and, second, refusing to own up to it – seem to amount to the major character flaw of being incapable of ever admitting to being wrong.
Perhaps Deeming, a brand-new MP, could have handled the rally and its aftermath better. But it was no secret she intended to go; indeed, she spoke about it in the parliament as she urged Labor’s minister for women to attend.
As leader, Pesutto might have told her then that he didn’t support her going; he might have offered her mentorship or suggestions about how best to channel her undoubted courage and support for women’s rights.
Instead, as evidence in court has shown, once Andrews had savaged the Liberals as guilty by association with neo-Nazis, even though Deeming had not the slightest inkling that neo-Nazis would turn up, Pesutto threw her under a bus.
Instead of gritting his teeth and defending Deeming’s right to free speech and excusing her from any blame over the gatecrashers, Pesutto went to water.
The next day he summoned Deeming to a meeting with the four-person Liberal leadership group and had her berated for exposing the Liberals to a smear campaign from the premier.
It was the secret recording of this meeting, made by the Liberal deputy leader David Southwick, that was played last week in court.
In it, Pesutto accepted that Deeming was not a neo-Nazi or a neo-Nazi associate, and further accepted that she had a right to speak freely against biological males invading female-only spaces such as toilets and change rooms, but asserted that these views would be better expressed from the crossbench and invited her to sit as an independent. So, it was less the turn-up of neo-Nazis to Deeming’s rally that had angered Pesutto but Deeming being there in the first place in support of women’s rights.
This was a continuation of the Victorian Liberal establishment’s aversion to anything and anyone that could be described as conservative – even though plenty of old-style leftist feminists such as JK Rowling have been aghast at the erosion of women’s rights in favour of biological men who merely identify as women.
Even in evidence on Wednesday, Pesutto could not outright condemn the example of a male rapist being put in a women’s prison because they now self-identified as a woman.
It is Pesutto’s views that are out of step with rank-and-file Liberals, not Deeming’s; the mere fact Deeming remains a member of the Victorian Liberal Party (as opposed to the parliamentary team) is evidence of her support among the base because it shows that Pesutto doesn’t have the numbers to remove her.
The result of Pesutto’s implacable fight to the finish to be rid of Deeming, not because she’s a neo-Nazi sympathiser but just because she’s a conservative, has divided and demoralised the wider Liberal Party in Victoria without reaping any apparent electoral benefit.
Sure, on some polls, the state Liberals are finally competitive with Labor. But as Peter Dutton has observed, given the longevity and record of the Andrews-Allan government, the state Libs should be at least as far in front in Victoria as they are in Queensland.
That they are not is attributable to ongoing internal division (because if you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the state) and the lack of a clear contest of ideas and policy. Indeed, at the most recent state election the Victorian opposition’s policy was left of Labor on some issues, with the net result that even after the world’s longest lockdowns Labor won a record third term, thus illustrating one of politics’ iron laws: Labor-lite Liberals lose.
As Dutton has shown, even in Victoria the Liberals can be competitive if they create a contest against a bad Labor government and they are now competitive in at least four Victorian seats.
If only Pesutto had shown as much fight against Labor as he has against Deeming.
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