Expelling Moira Deeming on Friday would send a clear message that there’s no place inside the parliamentary Liberal Party for forthright conservative women, at least in Victoria, and maybe no place for conservative men either.
It all started six weeks ago when Deeming attended a Let Women Speak event in Melbourne, defending the right of women and girls to have their own spaces, that attracted a trans-rights counter-protest and was then gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
Predictably, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews blamed the Liberal Party for the debacle and accused it of fomenting hate.
But instead of explaining and defending the actions of his junior colleague, leader John Pesutto panicked and sent the Liberal parliamentary team a letter accusing Deeming of guilt by association because of her “involvement”, he said, with people “associated with far right-wing extremist groups including neo-Nazi activists” that was based on nothing more than a discredited Wikipedia entry. And the next day he circulated a motion to expel her from the state party on the grounds that she’d brought it into disrepute.
Except when the partyroom met a week later, at least 10 Liberals spoke in Deeming’s defence. Richard Riordan said: “We cannot kick her out of the partyroom on two unjustifiable lies.” Bev McArthur said: “We are all entitled to a different opinion and we are entitled to voice it,” Kim Wells said: “I cannot believe how badly this has been handled.” Chris Crewther said: “We must push against guilt by association.” Nick McGowan said “labelling someone a Nazi … it’s like calling someone a murderer, a rapist or a pedophile”. Renee Heath said it was not “the extreme left or the extreme right that keeps us in opposition, it is extreme division”. And Joe McCracken said: “We need to find another option that saves face for John but saves Moira.”
And that’s ultimately what they came up with. After a powerful speech from Deeming revealing that she’d been partly brought up by an uncle who was a Holocaust survivor and that she was herself a survivor of child sexual abuse, there was a brief adjournment, after which the partyroom minutes noted “people have been moved … we have reached a compromise”. That compromise, recorded by the official secretary, Heath, was a nine-month suspension from the partyroom for Deeming in conjunction with a “joint statement from the leader’s office” that would “make it clear that no one was accusing Moira of being a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser”.
Yet for six weeks there was no statement from the Opposition Leader clearing Deeming of the neo-Nazi slur. What there had been was a further internal brawl about the minutes, culminating in another partyroom meltdown that had Heath complaining in an email to her parliamentary colleagues that she “once again (felt) completely stitched up and misrepresented by the leadership” and the way “conservative women in this party are treated is nothing short of bullying”. Before last year’s state election, it should be remembered, Matthew Guy, then leader, had threatened to ban Heath from sitting in the Liberal partyroom if elected because her father was the pastor of a conservative Christian church.
It was in an effort finally to get from Pesutto the exoneration on which the partyroom had agreed that Deeming emailed the leadership last Thursday that if it wasn’t forthcoming by 2pm, “I will consider that the leadership have failed to honour the suspension agreement” and will “instruct my lawyers to commence legal proceedings”. Deeming has said she hoped using lawyers to mediate between her and Pesutto would get him to honour the earlier deal.
But when Pesutto, later that same day, publicly said nothing in his dossier had “ever accused (her) of being a Nazi or herself having Nazi sympathies”, Deeming decided to draw a line under the saga and move on. With Pesutto’s statement and with the belated publication of the partyroom minutes clearing her, Deeming advised Victorian Liberal Party president Greg Mirabella last Thursday night that she had not, and would not, take any legal action against the party and followed this up with a public statement last Saturday.
But instead of declaring peace in our time, Pesutto on Sunday accepted a notice of motion from five MPs (including Guy) for a further expulsion bid to be considered at a partyroom meeting on Friday, despite the fact it was not signed and did not specify any reason for expulsion as required by section 59 of the parliamentary Liberal Party constitution.
Yet again, the Liberal Party is the political story in Victoria – and not the budget woes and corruption taint of the Andrews government – because of Pesutto’s fixation with purging the partyroom of conviction conservatives.
If Deeming is expelled on Friday – and it seems that she will have to go or the leader will – she will remain a Liberal Party member (because she continues to have strong support from the party’s rank and file) but will be in the bizarre position of being banished from her own party’s parliamentary caucus. And Pesutto will have failed the most basic test of leadership, which is to keep his team together and to honour his commitments.
It’s remarkable that not once in the six weeks since their initial meeting has Pesutto met Deeming or even spoken to her, despite repeated requests.
At one level, this is the story of yet another Victorian Liberal leader intimidated by Andrews into responding to Labor’s agenda and goes a long way to explaining why the Liberals have had only one term in office for close to 25 years.
At a deeper level, it’s the working out, in a particularly brutal way, of the internal argument over the extent to which the Liberal Party is progressive or conservative. Successful leaders know it has to be both, depending on the issue or the circumstance. As John Howard often said, the Liberal Party is the political custodian in Australia of both the small-L liberal tradition of John Stuart Mill and the small-C conservative tradition of Edmund Burke. As Tony Abbott often said: “The Liberal Party is the freedom party, it’s the tradition party, but above all it’s the patriot party.”
In fact, the best way to keep the Liberal Party united, as Abbott well understood, is to take up the fight to your opponents.
Mostly this should be on bread-and-butter issues such as, in Victoria, the Labor government’s tax increases, regulatory burden, failure to build infrastructure on time and on budget, and inability to run the health system.
But it shouldn’t cop out of an alternative energy policy, supporting reliable baseload power, because it’s frightened of climate activism; or shirk culture fights, over an activist school curriculum, gender policies that erase women, or the government’s quasi-cancelling of Australia Day just because it’s worried about the politically correct tendencies of inner-city voters. The millions of people who, not unreasonably, think biology should trump ideology and that keeping the lights on is more important than climate panic deserve to be represented by a mainstream political party and eventually will create a new one for themselves if the Liberals are no longer up for it.
To be pro-women does not make you anti-trans, and if the Liberal Party were to declare it would have no truck with cancelling women via phrases such as “chest-feeding” and “people who menstruate” it might be surprised how many voters cheer. What the Deeming saga shows is it won’t solve its “women problem” by alienating those women who refuse to surrender to political correctness the rights they fought so hard to win.
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