If you know your Star Wars films, there is a scene in the 1977 movie where Luke Skywalker enters the Cantina with R2-D2 and C-3PO, only to be met by an angry bartender. This dialogue follows:
“Hey! We don’t serve their kind here.”
“What?”
“Your droids, they’ll have to wait outside. We don’t want them here.”
Life as a whole, as well as in politics, has similar scenes playing out all the time. And if you are a Christian who is also a conservative, you know the feeling well. You are not welcome in so many places. The political landscape is certainly one of them.
Consider the ongoing Moira Deeming saga which just goes from bad to worse. The brainless wonders in the Victorian Liberal Party have said that her kind is not welcome there. So a few days ago they had yet another vote to make sure she stays at the back of the bus.
They voted 19-11 to expel the Christian and conservative MP from the party room, hoping to finally be done with her. Yet she has dug in her heels, saying she is not going anywhere, but will now sit as an ‘independent liberal’ – whatever that means or however that might play out.
In an interview with Peta Credlin of Sky News, she explained why:
You might have been expelled from the Liberal parliamentary team on Friday but you’re still a Liberal Party member. Is there any way you can be bullied into resigning from the Liberal Party?
That will never happen. If they want to get me out of the party, then it’s going to be another public round of beating me up for doing nothing wrong. And if they want to have another go, they are welcome to it, but I know how much support I’ve got amongst party members because thousands and thousands of them have contacted my office since March. I will never resign. I will never quit. I will not do their dirty work for them, I have much too much dignity for that.
And I am not going to help them to smear, or label as extremist, a whole movement of women who just want their ordinary and reasonable, rights protected.
They continue:
It’s been a really rugged time for you. A baptism of fire for a very new MP. How do you feel after Friday?
I feel completely betrayed. I honoured the terms of my suspension, but John Pesutto did not. I feel done over, like they were stringing me along, hoping to find some other way to get rid of me because they don’t like my views on issues like women, and they’ve already worked out I have had these views for a long, long time and I am committed to defending them.
You’re a mum of four kids, sort of toll has this taken on you personally?
It’s been awful. Our whole household has been on edge. The children keep looking out the window for suspicious cars because we’ve had the media camped outside our home for days on end. We even had someone push through our back fence into the garden. I’ve got little ones and they don’t feel safe. How is that right? As well, I find it terrifying and stressful that my children might find out about my own sexual abuse that I was forced to publicly reveal to defend myself, because I haven’t even had those sorts of conversations with my own children….
You have Liberal MPs that say they agree with you privately, don’t you?
Yes, I do. So many of them say, I agree with you privately, Moira, but I just can’t run the media gauntlet. And I say why not? They say they’re scared of media criticism and I say to them, then don’t expect me to be grateful for your support behind closed doors because the women and children won’t be grateful that you agreed in secret but couldn’t come out and defend them.
Moira is a champion, as I have said so often before. But that cannot be said about Pesutto and all the other spineless wonders in the Liberal Party leadership who do not give a rip about core principles and what is right, but only seem to care about keeping their careers, climbing the ladder, having a cushy income, and playing politics.
And it is not just in Victoria of course, but includes all the other states, as well as the Federal Libs. Most of them are useless and will never be able to take on the hard leftists who are now running this country. Gutless wimps like Pesutto will never challenge hardened political machines like that of Andrews and Co. So with these lame excuses for opposition parties, we are seemingly left forever with these secular left governments completely destroying Victoria and Australia.
Getting back to the vote last Friday, it is important that we name and shame all those who have turned on Moira and said they do not care about conservative values, the well-being of children, and the rights of women. Here is the list:
Pro-Pesutto: John Pesutto, David Southwick, Georgie Crozier, Matt Bach, Roma Britnell, David Davis, Wayne Farnham, Matthew Guy, Sam Groth, Ann-Marie Hermans, Wendy Lovell, Trung Luu, Cindy McLeish, Evan Mulholland, James Newbury, Michael O’Brien, Brad Rowswell, Bridget Vallence and Jess Wilson.
Pro-Deeming: Brad Battin, Chris Crewther, Renee Heath, David Hodgett, Bev McArthur, Joe McCracken, Nick McGowan, Richard Riordan, Ryan Smith, Bill Tilley and Kim Wells.
It must be said that some of these folks who turned on Moira have claimed to be conservatives in the past. Well, when push comes to shove, they sure do not act like it. Evan Mulholland for example was with the “conservative” Institute of Public Affairs before becoming an MP.
And sadly Ann-Marie Hermans has said in the past that she is not only a conservative but a Christian as well. Yet we had two consistent conservative Christian female MPs who were both abandoned by her. In addition to Moira being expelled, we had Renee Heath who was demoted from her Party secretary role. And previously Hermans had sided with Pesutto against Heath as well:
A colleague is now considering lodging a formal complaint to the Department of Parliamentary Services on behalf of one of the MPs. It comes after a heated party room meeting on Tuesday morning which resulted in upper house MP Renee Heath leaving in tears.
Multiple sources have detailed the fiery exchange to the Herald Sun which occurred after Mr Pesutto is alleged to have accused Dr Heath of tampering with the minutes from a party room meeting in March to expel Moira Deeming from the Liberal parliamentary team.
In her role as party room secretary, Dr Heath is required to take down the minutes of what is said in each meeting. Supporters of Dr Heath told the Herald Sun that she was asked to provide the minutes from the March meeting. Dr Heath provided three different versions of the minutes, which she said was because the first copy was full of spelling mistakes and double ups. The second version was a neatened up copy of the initial notes. But she then provided a third batch of notes which included comments from upper house MP Ann-Marie Hermans, which had initially been left out.
A source in the room on Tuesday, speaking anonymously to explain what happened, said Mr Pesutto immediately moved a motion to reject the minutes provided by Dr Heath. This was seconded by upper house MP Ann-Marie Hermans who strongly supported the accusations against Dr Heath.
Whatever exactly took place there, all up it seems to be a case of ‘with friends like these…’. When two champion Christian conservative women are abandoned by another woman who claims to be a Christian conservative, you sure gotta wonder what is going on here.
Lyle Shelton of Family First also weighed in on this issue. He begins:
While campaigning in Victoria last year, I witnessed several Liberal candidates pitching for Christian and conservative votes. Nothing wrong with this, Family First was doing the same. We live in a democracy. While the failure of the institutional Labor and Liberal parties to stand for family, faith, freedom and life is the reason Family First exists, the cause is the cause and we’re always glad when the major parties preselect fellow travellers. Many religious and conservative constituencies are alarmed, with good reason, about both Victoria’s and Australia’s drift to the radical left.
He concludes:
Sadly, there is way too much silence in the Liberal party. But what we saw last week was far worse than silence. Deeming was being punished for speaking up for girls’ and women’s safety. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she knows the risks of biological males being given access to girls’ and women’s spaces.
Despite this, her leader John Pesutto smeared her as a Nazi sympathiser, a vicious lie, and then once the lie was exposed refused to exonerate her as agreed. Shunned and shamed, Deeming sought to clear her name, working patiently over many weeks. Pesutto arrogantly refused and she was left with no choice but to take legal action.
Another historical figure Christians like is Edmund Burke. He famously said: “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”. Evan Mulholland and Ann-Marie Hermans didn’t just do nothing.
Having courted Christian votes before the election, last week they cooperated with a grave injustice in expelling a brave woman who was simply doing what they had once implied they would do. These events must be a wake-up call for religious and conservative leaders. Greater discernment of Liberal party candidates courting their votes and volunteers will be needed in future.
Biblical afterword
Just this morning I read this in 2 Chronicles 19:1-3: “Jehoshaphat the king of Judah returned in safety to his house in Jerusalem. But Jehu the son of Hanani the seer went out to meet him and said to King Jehoshaphat, ‘Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the Lord? Because of this, wrath has gone out against you from the Lord. Nevertheless, some good is found in you, for you destroyed the Asheroth out of the land, and have set your heart to seek God’.”
It seems we have some Christian MPs who are more concerned with supporting decidedly anti-Christian leaders while turning on their own. That never ends well.
