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When women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen appeared in Auckland last year, it unleashed a wave of hate and violence against women not seen since suffragette Dorothy Day was beaten and tortured in Occoquan Workhouse in 1917. Women were screamed at, spat on, and assaulted, including an elderly lady smashed in the face by a strapping young man.
That the left were gearing up to bash women, in the name of fetishistic, cross-dressing men, was increasingly obvious in the week before, when Keen toured Australia. In Hobart, Greens politician Cassy O’Connor smirked and led a screeching mob to within an inch of violence. But it was the rally in Melbourne days before which set off an earthquake that is still rocking the Victorian Liberal Party – and being played out in court, right now.
One of the attendees at the Melbourne rally, on the steps of the state parliament in Spring Street, was then-Liberal MP Moira Deeming. Deeming was already an endangered species in the Victorian Liberals – an outspoken, centre-right woman. But it was a bizarre twist in the rally that lit the powder keg.
Seemingly out of nowhere, with a high-fiving police escort, marched a gaggle of black-clad neo-Nazis. For reasons known only to VicPol, the neo-Nazis were escorted to front and centre on the steps, where they proceeded to pose for the cameras with cartoonish Nazi salutes. Most of the women’s rights activists, including Deeming, were blissfully unaware of what was taking place.
Until the storm broke.
Drunk with glee at finding actual Nazis, the left erupted in an onanistic orgy of denunciation. Worse, desperate not to be left behind in the rush, wet, weak Liberal leader John Pesutto immediately took to the airwaves to denounce his own MP as a ‘Nazi’. Not content with that, Pesutto rallied a party-room pile-on and dismissed Deeming from the party.
Deeming, to her credit, wasn’t about to take it all lying down. Hence the defamation action currently running in the Federal Court. But the action is about far more than defending the reputation of a woman wrongly smeared: it’s about just what the Victorian Liberal party actually stands for. Even more critically, with the Labor government on an inexorable downward slide in the polls, do Pesutto’s gutless Liberals even deserve to be considered as a credible alternative?
To Pesutto, Deeming’s real crime is not that she was at a rally gatecrashed by neo-Nazis but that she’s a conservative. That’s why he wanted her gone.
Yet if outspoken conservatives have no place in the Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party, why would any conservative vote for them?
The case, if nothing else, is exposing Pesutto, like all Liberal ‘moderates’ (code for dripping-wet lefties with blue ties), is a pathetic cry-bully.
Of course Pesutto is now trying to walk all that back, but he’s not helped by the existence of a secret recording from a meeting where this is pretty much said, and the fact he settled out of court with a public apology to [Angie Jones] and Keen.
The secret recording, made by the Liberal deputy leader David Southwick, is shaping up to be the biggest self-inflicted bombshell since Nixon installed a tape-recorder in the Oval Office desk.
In it, Pesutto accepted that Deeming was not a neo-Nazi or a neo-Nazi associate, and further accepted that she had a right to speak freely against biological males invading female-only spaces such as toilets and change rooms, but asserted that these views would be better expressed from the crossbench and invited her to sit as an independent. So, it was less the turn-up of neo-Nazis to Deeming’s rally that had angered Pesutto but Deeming being there in the first place in support of women’s rights.
This was a continuation of the Victorian Liberal establishment’s aversion to anything and anyone that could be described as conservative.
This is the existential question for the Libs that’s the real point of the case. For the last two decades, the Liberal establishment have laboured under the delusion that, if they just keep moving further to the left, maybe the chattering classes will finally invite them to the fashionable dinner parties. It’s a fool’s errand, of course: the Liberals could cross-dress en masse and make Greta Thunberg their mascot, and the chatterers will still call them Nazis. Meanwhile, outside the tiny bubble of the fashionable inner-suburbs, the people who would normally vote for the Liberals are walking away in disgust. They already have the Greens party, after all – why would they vote for a pale imitation in a better suit?
In other words, this whole expensive and drawn-out exercise in washing the party’s dirty linen in public was triggered by Pesutto’s fear of being portrayed as too right wing to govern Victoria; indeed, it’s something he specifically references in the secret recording.
It’s a classic case of allowing your opponents to dictate your actions. And yet another example of the Victorian Liberals being so utterly spooked by [Daniel Andrews] that they end up looking politically paralysed and, frankly, pathetic.
If conservative women wanted weak, gutless men who aren’t prepared to defend women against cross-dressing predators, they’d vote Green or Labor. They’re certainly not going to vote for the likes of Pesutto.
It is Pesutto’s views that are out of step with rank-and-file Liberals, not Deeming’s; the mere fact Deeming remains a member of the Victorian Liberal Party (as opposed to the parliamentary team) is evidence of her support among the base because it shows that Pesutto doesn’t have the numbers to remove her.
Is it any wonder that ‘Dictator Dan’ ran roughshod over this weak rabble of a so-called ‘leadership’? If, by a miracle, Labor survive the next election in Victoria, it will be only because there was no alternative worth voting for.
