Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto accused of bullying Renee Heath, as Moira Deeming fallout continues

Victorian Liberal MPs are considering making a formal human resources complaint about John Pesutto after the Opposition Leader was accused of reducing a female MP to tears.

Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Ascui

Victorian Liberal MPs are considering making a formal human resources complaint about John Pesutto after the Opposition Leader was accused of reducing a female MP to tears during a partyroom meeting on Tuesday.

Mr Pesutto avoided fronting the media on Wednesday, despite attending the sitting of parliament, and his office declined to comment on “internal party meetings” in response to detailed questions.

Multiple Liberal sources have told The Australian several MPs are considering making complaints, and one has discussed how to go about it with the Department of Parliamentary Ser­vices, which is responsible for HR in state parliament.

The latest internal stoush relates to a discussion around minutes of a March 27 Liberal partyroom meeting, at which MPs voted to suspend upper house MP Moira Deeming from the party following her appearance at a Let Women Speak rally gatecrashed by Nazis.

In a verbal interaction on Tuesday that has been described as “bullying” by multiple witnesses, Mr Pesutto is alleged to have accused junior MP and ­partyroom minute-taker Renee Heath of having leaked the minutes of the March meeting to Sky News anchor Peter Credlin.

Both Ms Heath and Credlin deny that she was the source of the leak.

In an email sent to the entire Victorian Liberal partyroom after Tuesday’s meeting, Ms Heath said she felt “completely stitched up and misrepresented” by the party leadership, “with no ability to defend myself”.

“I wasn’t even given the space to correct the mistruths about me in today’s meeting,” Ms Heath said in her email to colleagues.

“I am upset. Very upset. The way I have been treated and the way other conservative women in this party are treated is nothing short of bullying.

“Why can’t we respect each other? Why can’t you have an idea or a difference of opinions without having eyes rolled, and nasty and personal interjections?”

Tensions remain between Mr Pesutto, Ms Deeming and numerous Liberal MPs who believe she has been treated unfairly, with Ms Deeming’s allies accusing Mr Pesutto of failing to live up to his side of the compromise reached during the March meeting.

At that meeting, Ms Deeming agreed to a nine-month suspension from the party rather than the expulsion for which Mr Pesutto had pushed, on the understanding that Mr Pesutto would issue a joint media statement with her, making it clear that he was not ­accusing her of being a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser.

No such statement has since been issued.

In response to questions including why no statement had been issued, why no meeting minutes had been circulated, and how Mr Pesutto responded to claims he had “bullied” conservative women in his party, a spokesman for the Opposition Leader said he would not comment on “internal party meetings”.