Tweet revenge over a bumbling politician who panicked

Victorian Liberal Opposition leader John Pesutto after his loss to Moira Deeming in the Federal Court for defamation. Picture: NewsWire / Ian Currie

Long after John Pesutto pays Moira Deeming damages of $300,000 and her legal costs, this defamation case will hang around his neck like a rotting albatross.

He will forever be known as the politician who was panicked by a tweet, responded carelessly by accusing one of his MPs of being a neo-Nazi sympathiser, got his facts wrong, changed his mind in court, infuriated a judge and gave long, unresponsive answers to simple questions.

Those are lasting wounds that would be difficult for anyone to live down, let alone a member of parliament who aspires to lead a state that desperately needs careful stewardship.

Those wounds have been inflicted by judge David O’Callaghan’s ruling in a case that should never have come to court.

Given the magnitude of Pesutto’s loss, it’s astounding he failed to surrender at a much earlier stage instead of risking such a public disaster.

O’Callaghan’s 195-page judgment hands total victory to Deeming, the state Liberal MP who sued after Pesutto said she associated with neo-Nazis, was a neo-Nazi sympathiser, helped promote a Nazi agenda, was unfit to be a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party and deserved to be expelled from said party.

If this ruling results in the destruction of Pesutto’s leadership of the Victorian Liberal Party, it would be wrong to blame Deeming.

Yes, her silk, Sue Chrysanthou SC, persuaded the judge those defamatory imputations had been conveyed in Pesutto’s public utterances. And yes, Chrysanthou demolished every one of Pesutto’s defences after subjecting him to four gruelling days of cross-examination – caused, according to the judge, by the Liberal leader’s inability or refusal to give simple answers to simple enough questions.

The real victor is a man who was not in court: Labor’s former premier Dan Andrews.

It was Andrews, according to the judge, who made Pesutto believe there was an urgent need to make public statements about Deeming because of what he believed Andrews might be about to say about the Liberal Party.

The judge found the perceived urgency to publish those defamatory statements had been driven by fear of the political damage that would be inflicted upon his fledgling leadership by Andrews.

“He was concerned about being clobbered,” the judge wrote.

He quoted Pesutto’s evidence in which he said: “Andrews came out strong today on that tweet … signalling what’s to come.”

The tweet that so concerned Pesutto had decried the presence of neo-Nazis outside Parliament House and had accused them of seeking to deny the rights of the trans community.

Pesutto swore in an affidavit that he considered Andrews to be an able politician who should not be underestimated. “I was concerned if I did not take action, and quickly, he would seek to link the rest of the party to neo-Nazis on the steps of parliament and do so using Mrs Deeming’s presence at the rally,” the affidavit says.

The problem is, the judge found Pesutto needed to take care “when bandying around words like Nazi and Nazi sympathisers”.

“But he did not take such care, and it is precisely because he did not do so that he uttered words which conveyed the serious imputations the subject of my findings,” the judge said.

That was a fatal weakness, but the disaster kept growing. Pesutto was all over the shop on a key aspect of his own argument. The judge noted Pesutto had repeatedly said he never believed Deeming was a Nazi, a Nazi sympathiser or that she associated with such people but he swore in an affidavit he “believed it to be true” and “intended to convey” that Deeming associated with neo-Nazi activists “but he recanted that evidence in his examination in chief”’.

Chris Merritt is vice-president of the Rule of Law Institute