By Rachel Eddie
For three weeks, Melbourne’s Federal Courtroom 6K has been treated to something rare in politics – frankness.
And in the process, the defamation trial launched by ousted Liberal Moira Deeming against Opposition Leader John Pesutto exposed much about the internal workings of political parties.
Opposition Leader John Pesutto arriving at the Federal Court on Friday.Credit: Darrian Traynor
The court heard members of parliament weren’t always paying much attention after “hours on end” in the chamber, were not under oath at press conferences with journalists, and that colour-coded spreadsheets are used to war game high-stakes internal votes.
“When one is standing behind one’s leader nodding one’s head, one isn’t always listening studiously to what was said,” former deputy upper house leader Matt Bach glibly admitted on Tuesday.
And it turns out that – in the Liberal Party at least – pretty much everything is recorded. That’s what former premier Ted Baillieu warned, Bach told the court. The trial unearthed and played two covert recordings of different internal meetings.
Witnesses wrapped up on Friday – day 14 of the trial – after cross-examination spilled into overtime. Of course, it didn’t end without drama. Deeming’s barrister Sue Chrysanthou, SC, was interrupted mid-sentence for a late 30-minute adjournment on Friday, while the court dealt with “a security issue”.
Moira Deeming arrives at court on Friday.Credit: Darrian Traynor
A Liberal source, speaking anonymously because they weren’t authorised to discuss the incident, said a man dressed as a security guard was found in court – carrying eggs. Another source close to the trial said Chrysanthou and Pesutto’s barrister, Dr Matt Collins, KC, left the courtroom to meet Justice David O’Callaghan to discuss the issue.
“The hearing resumed once the issue was dealt with,” a Federal Court of Australia spokesperson told The Age.
The final dribs and drabs of evidence will be presented to the court next week, with closing submissions due in late October.
By then, some in the Liberal Party room hope Pesutto will no longer be opposition leader – despite him having climbed in the polls since Premier Jacinta Allan took office.
His backers cling on to that and argue that Pesutto’s four days in the witness box gave them no reason to withdraw their support.
Deputy Liberal leader David Southwick could be a target. It was revealed he was responsible for the covert recording of a meeting between the leadership team and Deeming on the day after the Let Women Speak rally on the steps of the Victorian parliament she helped organise. Neo-Nazis were among several groups of protesters that arrived that day, on March 18, 2023.
Under one possibility gaining momentum to give the team a clean slate, all four leadership positions could be spilled on October 15 when the party’s 30 MPs gather for their sitting-week meeting when parliament resumes.
Regardless of whether any hopeful challenger can gather the numbers, a conga line of Liberal MPs talking in court – for and against Pesutto – over the past three weeks was hardly a display of party unity.
Deputy Liberal leader David Southwick outside the Federal Court on Tuesday.Credit: Joe Armao
“[He] can’t unite the team after the damage that’s been done over the last three weeks,” one MP said on condition of anonymity to be frank about internal thinking. People are “pissed”, another said.
In the late afternoon meeting on March 19, 2023, the day after the rally, Pesutto, Southwick, Bach, and upper house leader Georgie Crozier informed Deeming they would seek her expulsion.
Deeming alleges Pesutto defamed her as a Nazi sympathiser as part of his “campaign” to have her expelled from the parliamentary party room, which Pesutto rejects. Deeming has disavowed Nazism and rejects the masked men in black, who repeatedly performed the salute, were there to support the cause of the rally or that Let Women Speak is anti-trans.
In their evidence to the court, Liberal frontbenchers Richard Riordan and David Hodgett and MPs Kim Wells, Renee Heath and Joe McCracken all said they believed the leadership had moved too quickly – and unfairly.
Wells told the court last week he had been “double-crossed” by the leadership team as part of a compromise deal that Deeming would be suspended from the party room instead, claiming a March 27, 2023, party room meeting should have resulted in a joint statement from Pesutto and Deeming – but that her exoneration never came.
Heath has also lost skin in court after admitting she had shared her draft notes of that meeting, which she took as secretary, with Deeming and two other MPs.
About a quarter of the party room faced cross-examination and all but two of the MPs were mentioned in court in some way over the three weeks – thanks to the production of private text messages and a spreadsheet that Pesutto’s staff created predicting how every MP would vote on the March expulsion motion and how they could be swayed.
The experience has left the party room with little cause for confidence or trust in their colleagues.
Former Liberal MP Matt Bach arrives at the Federal Court on Tuesday.Credit: Chris Hopkins
“Everyone in shadow cabinet is performing to a degree I can accept,” Pesutto told journalists on Wednesday.
He denied he would remove Riordan or Hodgett from his frontbench and backed Southwick as his deputy, who gave the court a personal explanation for secretly recording the March 19, 2023 meeting with Deeming.
Southwick had phoned Deeming on the afternoon of the rally and asked her to urgently and unequivocally denounce what had unfolded. Instead, he told the court, she trivialised it by drinking champagne with other organisers, who questioned whether the neo-Nazis were actually police officers or trans rights activists in disguise.
“That was personal to me,” Southwick, who is Jewish, told the court. “To behave that way, and to trivialise what was so offensive to me, I felt I couldn’t trust Mrs Deeming. She lied to me.”
Chrysanthou portrayed the recording of that meeting as evidence the leadership team bullied her as part of their determination to have her expelled.
Pesutto had drafted a statement that she was resigning from the party room before he had met with her and texts produced in court showed expulsion had been floated as soon as the night of the rally.
The leadership team – Pesutto, Southwick, Crozier and Bach – rejected this and argued the recording showed she had failed to understand the seriousness of what occurred.
“I would have more robust conversations than this with 11-year-olds most weeks, counsel,” said Bach, who is now a teacher and deputy principal in the UK.
Georgie Crozier (left), the leader of the opposition in the upper house, outside court on Wednesday.Credit: Joe Armao
Crozier said if it were her, as a new MP being asked to meet with the leadership, she would have done anything to show she was sorry and wanted to fix it.
“There was none of that, there was none of it,” she told the court on Thursday.
Deeming herself had also secretly recorded a meeting.
She had earlier met with Pesutto and Crozier on February 23, 2023, to deal with controversy over her inaugural speech to parliament in which she slammed “equality taken to extremes” and the release of her emails from her time at Melton City Council that were characterised in the media and by Labor as anti-trans and anti-abortion. Deeming rejects that.
In that meeting, she told her leaders she was not transphobic or homophobic and there was “no smoking gun” to prove she was.
“My biggest fans are gay people and trans people,” Deeming said in the meeting, which was played to the court. “Would you at least consider going on a full-fronted attack?”
The court heard yet more frankness from Pesutto, who was unaware he was being recorded, saying that he didn’t want the debate. He wanted the party to unite behind core issues that mattered to Victorians to replicate Labor’s ability under then-premier Daniel Andrews.
“He wins seats,” Pesutto said in the recording.
Three weeks in the Federal Court has allowed Victorian voters the rare chance to hear their politicians say it plain.
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