‘Abbott was up to his neck in it’: The collapse of the Victorian Liberals

Liberal MP Moira Deeming was indignant. Her Victorian party leader, John Pesutto, was exasperated.

“I am not a Nazi,” she told him.

In response, he said she and the party were being judged for the company she kept.

“You can’t hang out with these people,” Pesutto said. “You just can’t.”

The exchange took place on March 19 last year, the day after a “Let Women Speak” rally Deeming helped organise. The rally was held on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House, where the gathered speakers protested against transgender rights. It turned ugly with the arrival of men in black, who repeatedly gave the Nazi salute and carried a banner that read “destroy paedo filth”.

Deeming had been called in to a meeting with Pesutto and other senior members of the parliamentary party for a dressing-down about her role as an organiser and speaker at the rally.

The meeting set the wheels in motion for Deeming’s subsequent expulsion from the party and a defamation action that began this week in the Federal Court, which is expected to run another two weeks. Deeming is suing Pesutto for allegedly falsely portraying her as a Nazi sympathiser.

Deeming’s counsel, Sue Chrysanthou, SC, argued the opposition leader “went on a campaign of destruction against my client” by tarring her “with the Nazi brush”.

In a covert recording of that 70-minute meeting with Pesutto, however, the opposition leader and others present did not doubt Deeming’s assertion that she was not sympathetic to Nazis. Nor did they doubt her assertion that she did not know they would turn up to the rally. Rather, they questioned her other associations.

Pesutto pointed to Katherine Deves, the Liberal candidate for the New South Wales seat of Warringah, who was trounced in the 2022 federal election after the revelation of social media posts in which she had called trans people “surgically mutilated” and said she was “triggered” by the sight of the pride flag.

They also pointed to Melbourne woman Angie Jones. Deputy Liberal leader David Southwick, who is Jewish, noted a tweet from Jones that read: “Nazis and women want to get rid of pedo filth, why don’t you?”

There was also Deeming’s association with the rally’s keynote speaker, Kellie-Jay Nyishie Keen-Minshull, also known as Posie Parker, a British anti-trans activist who at the event on the steps of parliament baited trans counter-protesters who identified as women with the greeting “Hello boys”.

Keen-Minshull maintains there is “no such thing as non-binary”, that “no woman has a penis, no man has a vagina”, and that gender-affirming medical care for young people is “child abuse”. She denies she has any association with neo-Nazis.

In court this week, Pesutto’s counsel, Matt Collins, KC, noted that Keen-Minshull had used Nazi symbols in previous social media posts, including one featuring a rainbow-coloured Gestapo logo and the word “Pridestapo”, and another in which she changed her profile picture to one of a Barbie doll wearing a Nazi uniform.

“Now, one can have a civilised debate about whether advocates for trans and gender diverse people’s rights do so in a civilised way, or ought to adopt a different tone, but to equate them with the most murderous regime in the history of the world is odious,” said Collins.

“This is a case about whether Mr Pesutto honestly held the view that a person who associated with someone who would post that kind of content is a fit and proper person to be in the party that he leads.”

Irrespective of whether the court finds Deeming was defamed by Pesutto, the undeniable reality is that she was and is a huge problem for the Liberal Party.

She is not only an anti-trans activist. She is opposed to voluntary euthanasia, is anti-abortion and considers the authors of the Safe Schools policy to be “paedophile enablers”. She is also an anti-vaxxer.

In her first speech after being elected in November 2022, she condemned left-wing school curriculums and the decriminalisation of sex work.

She is a hardcore member of the religious right in Australia’s most progressive state. According to one of her former party colleagues, she is “a populist conservative … an activist more than a party member”.

The irony is, he says, that she was selected by the party to fill a vacancy created by the expulsion of former upper house MP Bernie Finn from the Liberal Party after he said abortion should be banned in Victoria, even for rape survivors.

Deeming is a case study of the battle that has gone on in the Victorian branch for years, between moderate and centrist forces and the religious- and hard-right.

The potted history, says her former colleague, goes back to 2016, under the Turnbull government, when reforms to the Senate voting regime made it much harder for small parties to do complex preference deals that would get their people elected.

One of those small parties was Family First, which was religiously based and socially conservative.

“The business model of Family First was ruined. So they then folded and said, ‘Go on into the Liberal Party,’ ” the Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper.

Prior to that, he says, factional politics had been more about personality than ideology, “not the neat conservatives versus moderate support that you get in New South Wales and South Australia, for example”.

Given the shrinking membership of the party, says another Liberal insider, “some people worked out that with numbers and a bit of passion you can be a part of the decision-making processes that even elect or preselect MPs”.

Family First was closely linked to the Pentecostal church, but Mormons were heavily recruited as well. There were conservative Catholics involved, too, most notably the long-serving federal MP Kevin Andrews, who was particularly close to former prime minister Tony Abbott.

“So,” says the Liberal MP, “they flooded the party. Tony Abbott was up to his neck in it.”

For a time the right – not all religious, some simply conservative – came to dominate.

One consequence, says another source, was that the party was pushed into electorally unpopular positions.

“In the 2018 state election, for example, Matthew Guy, who’s a moderate guy, against his better instincts ran a crazy right-wing, Dutton-style law-and-order campaign.”

Guy, who was then state leader, was trounced by Daniel Andrews’ Labor.

The story from there involves the power of Michael Sukkar, a federal MP; Michael Kroger, who was state president; Marcus Bastiaan, who had styled himself as a factional powerbroker; and Peta Credlin, who is from Victoria but came to prominence as Tony Abbott’s chief of staff.

“Michael Sukkar, Michael Kroger, and Marcus Bastiaan … briefly had power in our administrative committee in 2018, until it all collapsed in on itself because they had given promises to people about preselections that they couldn’t meet. Then Kroger resigned as party president,” says the MP.

“The non-right, a mixture of centrists and moderates, took over and have held control ever since. And that has pissed off Credlin and Abbott and Sukkar and others for a long time.

“So whenever they can see a point of difference or division, they will inject themselves into it.”

Indeed, Credlin, who is now a political commentator with Sky News, had been involved in advising Deeming on tactics. The court received 30 pages of messages between Credlin and Deeming, in which media strategy was discussed and where Credlin told Deeming how she might avoid expulsion. “We need you to survive this,” Credlin wrote. “You will lead the party one day.”

Some of the key figures on the far right have gone. Marcus Bastiaan is now based in South Australia, and running a factory that makes doors.

Ivan Stratov, a Mormon who was an active recruiter for the right, resigned from the powerful administrative committee in 2020 and was expelled from the party a year ago.

He should, it turns out, never have been allowed in to begin with. Before he joined the Liberals, he had run as a candidate for Family First, and as such would have needed the approval of two thirds of the state assembly before becoming a member. A report by the party’s constitutional committee found that vote did not occur.

Many others have quit, the Liberal MP says. “A lot of those people who were motivated by social issues and religion. You can’t please them,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “They don’t do compromise, and people who don’t do compromise get the shits with the party and quit.”

Even in their reduced number, however, they can still cause problems. They have resisted the expulsion of Deeming, for instance.

In May, Pesutto, fronting his first state council meeting as leader, was heckled with calls of “shame”. Some members staged a walkout. Some had cut-out Deeming masks.

There were only a few dozen of them, but the images did not convey the impression of a unified party.

As the old political maxim says, disunity is death.

After Deeming’s speech on the steps of parliament, former state MP Louise Staley texted Pesutto with a reference to a media report: “Moira Deeming at rally with neo-Nazis today.”

Pesutto replied: “This only gets worse from here. I don’t even understand why she wants to be in the Liberal party.”

Staley said Pesutto should “consider expelling her from the party for consorting with Nazis”.

Pesutto replied: “Agree.”

As a party insider notes: “John’s got a very difficult job – putting this court case to one side – in holding his party room together. He only won the leadership by one vote.

“He’s got a difficult path to tread, because his party room is so fraught. May not necessarily play out so well for him in his electorate of Hawthorn, which sits 100 per cent within Kooyong.”

Kooyong, of course, was one of the seats lost by the Liberals at the 2022 federal election. An independent candidate, Monique Ryan, defeated then treasurer Josh Frydenberg on a platform of integrity and climate action.

Pesutto’s hope of winning government, indeed his survival as a member of parliament, depends on projecting an image of moderation. Thus he went hard in the media, condemning the actions of the Nazis.

Peter Dutton, mindful that there was to be a byelection for the federal seat of Aston just two weeks after the rally, texted Pesutto a couple of days later: “John for the sake of Aston could you please put this issue to bed, no more media please.”

Pesutto messaged back: “Hi Peter, I do want to. Asap”.

They both failed. Aston became the first seat in 100 years to be won by the incumbent government at a byelection.

Pesutto, who wanted Deeming out straight away, instead wound up with her being suspended for nine months, then six weeks later, expelled from the party.

Now, 18 months down the track from the Let Women Speak imbroglio, Deeming haunts the Liberals still.

Recent reports in the conservative-friendly media suggest Dutton hopes to pick up as many as four seats in Victoria at next year’s federal election. Pesutto hopes that, with Daniel Andrews gone, Labor will be vulnerable come the next state election in November 2026.

That will require a massive effort to clean up an ungodly mess, created by godly people. 

This article was amended on September 23, 2024, to correct the location of Marcus Bastiaan’s door-making business. 

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