John Pesutto loses face, Moria Deeming lives on, and Victorian Liberals still have to live with the Kellie-Jay Keen fallout
John Pesutto capitulated because he had to. He now looks weak and desperate, having sold for the past week a message of strength and confidence.
The Liberal leader was rolled by his partyroom amid tears and anger over his handling of the issue. Pesutto read the room and jumped at a compromise.
His principal failure of leadership was in neglecting to consult enough MPs before seeking to have Moira Deeming expelled from the parliamentary party.
Pesutto did not know his partyroom, nor the extent to which Deeming’s right to make mistakes was ingrained in her colleagues’ thinking. These weaknesses are potentially catastrophic in any leader.
When Deeming spoke to the partyroom on Monday, her performance was described by one critic as emotional and contrite.
Deeming, according to Pesutto, had made the necessary concessions that saved her position, although she will be suspended for nine months and lose the whip’s position in the upper house.
The absolute danger for Pesutto is that Deeming becomes the Liberal Party’s next Geoff Shaw.
Shaw was the Liberal-turned-independent who went a long way towards bringing down the Baillieu-Napthine governments in 2014, which created the Dan Andrews era.
Deeming is not dissimilar to Shaw in that she is a religious conservative driven by social issues that don’t resonate greatly in inner-city seats.
There is nothing wrong with a politician having strong views on abortion, transgender reform or vaccine mandates.
But this world view needs to fit within the imperatives of the political party; her views are not Pesutto’s views.
The end result of the two-hour-plus partyroom meeting is the Liberal leader is half-pregnant. Deeming is still in the fold, she will still enjoy the support of many in the partyroom and somehow she and the leader’s office have to engineer a sophisticated way to sell her story.
It is OK to debate the merits of transgender reform, quite another to drag the party into a vote-losing row that embroils the leader and undermines his authority. Sure, Pesutto over-egged his response to Deeming’s appearance with British anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen but he was right to be wondering whether Deeming was a carbuncle that needed to be cut out.
The Liberals will learn this in the next nine months.
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