The post-script commentariat are overlooking five key details revealed in court during Moira Deeming’s ongoing battle to clear her name.
- Deeming was more demonised and shunned than the neo-Nazis who crashed the March 2023, ‘Let Women Speak’ (LWS) protest.
- Victorian Liberal leadership knew of and granted her permission to attend the LWS rally.
- Deeming was not helped, after asking for help in ticking all the required party guidelines.
- The current Victorian Liberal leadership appear to have played out a prejudiced agenda in its unjustified political persecution of Deeming.
- Hypocrisy. Liberal leadership did not throw Liberal frontbencher, Brad Battin under a bus after his November rally opposing the renaming of a lake was crashed by neo-Nazis.
By all appearances, what the current Victorian Liberal leadership saw in March 2023, was an apparent opportunity to push Deeming out.
This would also silence her advocacy for parental rights, sex-based rights, and common-sense safeguards for kids.
The assumed benefit for the Victorian Liberal leadership appears to have been twofold:
Apply enough mental, and emotional pressure to force an eventual resignation; score some cheap virtue-signalling vanity votes along the way.
Despite Deeming’s immediate condemnation of the neo-Nazi stunt, rather than back her, the Liberal leadership doubled down.
Disappointed with @VictoriaPolice, who let a bunch of masked men into the LWS buffer zone, terrifying women who were just trying to speak about their rights. Police managed to stop hordes of TRAs, but somehow could only walk masked men past us they did a horrible Nazi salute.
— Moira Deeming MP (@MoiraDeemingMP) March 18, 2023
There was apparent pressure on her to denounce innocent women as racist bigots without evidence.
They also never honoured her nine-month suspension agreement.
A key feature of which promised the party leadership’s full, and public exoneration.
Instead, former leader Matthew Guy escalated the unfathomably stupid assault on Deeming in order to protect Pesutto.
Guy, bizarrely upgraded the “Nazi threat” to “parliamentary terrorism,” declaring, “We’re not going to allow [the current leader] John Pesutto, to be attacked.”
As I warned in a May 2023, Caldron Pool article, this escalation wasn’t just ill-advised, it was sheer political suicide.
In sum, the Victorian Liberal leadership backed Labor leader, Daniel Andrews, not Liberal MP, Moira Deeming.
Deeming’s $300,000 AUD recent defamation win against Vic. Liberal leader, John Pesutto thoroughly vindicates that assessment.
In his lengthy ruling, the honourable, Justice David O’Callaghan, explained that Pesutto accusing Deeming of being a Nazi sympathiser was “inherently likely to cause serious harm to Mrs Deeming’s reputation.”
“That is especially so in circumstances where the leader of her own Parliamentary party was moving for her expulsion from it.” (546)
Contrary to Pesutto’s “belief,” Justice O’Callaghan said, much of the hate directed at Deeming over the LWS protest came from false reporting.
Pesutto’s apparent hatred for Deeming came out in his defence.
He argued that her reputation was already bad because she gave “succour to hateful and/or extreme social or political views.”
Pesutto then “swore, he knew ‘of no other person with such a bad reputation who has been allowed into the [Liberal] Party.'” (551-552)
Justice O’Callaghan refuted this, counter-arguing that being labelled a “hater” in political debates for holding controversial views, did not equate to having a bad reputation.
Just because [then Labor leader] Daniel Andrews said Deeming’s advocacy for women and kids, was “hateful,” doesn’t justify branding her a hater.
Nor is any of this evidence, Justice O’Callaghan asserted, that Deeming “has hateful views or gives succour to them.”
Of significance, the court ruling said, Pesutto was also cross-examined for four days because of “his inability or refusal to give a simple answer to simple enough questions.”
Although Justice O’Callaghan acknowledged that Pesutto believed his assertions about Deeming warranted publicity, he outrightly rejected the Liberal leader’s public interest defence.
Here, the Justice warned against the use of “loose language,” and criticised the Victorian Liberal leader, stating, “It was incumbent on Mr Pesutto to be careful not to convey a meaning that he did not intend…And [as a lawyer] Mr Pesutto knew as much.”
Notably, Pesutto repeatedly admitted: “he has never believed that Mrs Deeming was a Nazi, a Nazi sympathiser, a neo-Nazi or that she associated with such people.” (694)
Yet, Pesutto publicly, professionally, and personally maligned Deeming as someone who associates with Nazis.
Deeming wasn’t just maligned, she was ignored.
Explosively, Justice O’Callaghan suggested, Pesutto’s political persecution of Deeming seemed to be motivated by a “fear of Daniel Andrews.”
Not, as Pesutto “professed, a concern that the party and the Parliament would be brought into disrepute, as he claimed.” (696)
Justice O’Callaghan said, “The evidence about Mrs Deeming’s hurt, distress and embarrassment flowing from the impugned publications was extensive.”
He thus ruled that Pesutto defamed Moira Deeming.
It seems as though Pesutto viewed Deeming as an easy target.
The only “bad reputation,” was the one Pesutto pinned on her.
The irony isn’t lost on the keen observer.
Here is a male Liberal leader silencing a female MP for speaking at the “Let Women Speak” rally.
In light of the ruling, the question every post-script commentariat should be asking is this:
Why is Deeming still a pariah, and why is Pesutto still being propped up as a Liberal party paragon?
