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Here is the opposite of a news flash: the Victorian Liberals are a shambles.
Did Ryan Smith, a long-serving member who had leadership aspirations, do his leader John Pesutto the courtesy of flagging his intention to resign, thus triggering a byelection in his seat of Warrandyte, before announcing it publicly yesterday? Come off it.
Opposition Leader John Pesutto fronts the media earlier in May over another internal Liberal Party crisis.Credit: Darrian Traynor
Smith had wanted to be leader after last November’s election defeat, but after failing to attract enough initial support, he allied himself with Brad Battin against Pesutto in the party room ballot. Battin/Smith almost got there; Pesutto won by a single vote.
The closeness of that result set the Liberals on a terrible course. Rather than finding a way to pull together after a third successive election loss and face some hard truths about the rapidly changing Victorian electorate, they are finding new ways to engage in internal battles and damage each other. Now, Pesutto will be tested via a by-election, courtesy of Smith.
This wasn’t the way Pesutto expected it to go. After losing the once-plum seat of Hawthorn in 2018, Pesutto made a plan: he would win back Hawthorn in 2022 and become leader, steering the party in a new, more moderate and less hysterical direction. Crucially, he would set out to offer policies that would give swinging voters a positive reason to vote Liberal.
The expectation outside the party room was that the bulk of Pesutto’s colleagues would hold him in high regard for regaining the seat, especially since Liberal seats in the same part of Melbourne had gone either teal or Labor at the federal election a few months earlier.
But that did not reckon with the party’s reduced state, its sclerotic organisation, and the continued belief among many MPs that sticking to the formula of running hard anti-Andrews rhetoric and mining the community for reactionary votes would be the road to revival.
Add to that a big shot of pure personal ambition within a group that has been starved of power and attention for close on 10 years and you get to where the Liberals are.
After less than six months in the position, Pesutto’s fate is to be dogged by speculation about his hold on the leadership. Political historians will surely scratch their heads as they study how this came to be, the trigger being Pesutto’s dealings with the newly elected upper house member Moira Deeming.
Before entering parliament, Deeming was well-known as a campaigner on what are not widely regarded as mainstream issues in the increasingly “progressive” Victorian political environment. Writing in Spectator Australia in 2020, she condemned an international “transgender inquisition” that sought the “total decimation of women’s, men’s, children’s and parent’s rights in law”.
In the same year, she was elected to Melton council after declaring that she would never support rates being used to promote banning Australia Day, drag queen storytimes for toddlers, or “letting biological males who identify as female use female toilets and change rooms”.
In her first speech in parliament in February, she said that “what most women would consider to be sexual harassment and indecent exposure is now legal in Victoria” and that because children were now allowed in brothels, she had been told by police officer friends that “Victoria will now inevitably become the child rape capital of Australia”.
Pesutto spoke to Deeming after her speech about the need to work as part of a parliamentary team, seemingly to little avail. After she attended an anti-transgender rally in March that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis, he was thwarted in his attempt to have her expelled from the party by a majority of his colleagues and had to settle for suspending Deeming for nine months.
That’s where it could have sat but Deeming decided in May to threaten legal action against Pesutto. That made it inevitable that she would be expelled; that vote went Pesutto’s way 19-11.
Pesutto, in his desire to remake the party’s image, moved too quickly on Deeming and misread his level of authority. A new leader still on the learning curve, he made a mistake.
Deeming, a new MP, made a series of mistakes. She need not have attended that rally; she can make her public contributions in the parliament under privilege, and as a parliamentarian, she was no longer an activist. All she had to do was wait out her suspension and return to the party room before the year’s end.
As for the eventual 19-11 expulsion vote, that one-in-three Liberal MPs were intent on sabotaging Pesutto so blatantly tells us how badly the Liberals are going.
Pesutto messed up, but at least he appears to grasp the party’s challenges. There’s no painless way to modernise the Liberals.
Their future definitely does not lie with the branch members who staged the walkout on Pesutto over the Deeming issue at the recent state party conference. Nor does it lie with Deeming’s champions in the media who want a Liberal Party that skews further right.
The Liberals’ lower house primary vote last November was under 30 per cent. They won just 19 of the 88 seats on offer. To win in 2026, the Liberal-National coalition will need to secure 17 more seats to get a bare majority.
Hard policy work and dealing with reality could get them there. Squabbling and undermining won’t.
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