If you heard a political party leader had implied a fellow MP sympathised with neo-Nazis, you would probably assume it took place in an unstable democracy.
But it happened in the Australian state of Victoria and involved the opposition Liberal Party. It cost state leader John Pesutto his position and left him owing millions of dollars.
The Victorian Liberals have been busy shooting themselves in the foot for decades in a battle for control between moderates – such as Pesutto – and Christian right-wingers such as MP Moira Deeming.
The latest trouble started in March 2023 when Deeming addressed a rally called Let Women Speak outside the state parliament in Melbourne. The rally, headed by British anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen, was gatecrashed by black-clad supporters who gave Nazi salutes on the parliament’s steps.
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Victoria has long been at the centre of neo-Nazi activity in Australia and some of them leapt on the rally’s bandwagon, knowing it would get a lot of attention.
Performing a Nazi salute was soon banned, but there were long-term ramifications for the Liberal Party.
Deeming was initially suspended and later expelled from the parliamentary party after threatening to sue Pesutto, saying he had falsely portrayed her as a Nazi sympathiser.
Attempts to get her to drop the case failed and last December federal court judge David O’Callaghan ruled Pesutto had defamed Deeming on several occasions.
The judge found that in an interview with national broadcaster ABC “the imputation found to be conveyed is that Mrs Deeming knowingly associates or sympathises with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and is thus unfit to be a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party”.
Deeming was awarded 300,000 Australian dollars (€167,000) in damages. Pesutto was told to pay costs of about two million Australian dollars.
He resigned as party leader while Deeming was reinstated.
Though a well-off man, Pesutto didn’t have $2.3 million lying around and was on the verge of bankruptcy until the Liberal Party bailed him out with a $1.5 million loan last month, just days before the deadline for paying his debts.
The party did it for reasons of self-preservation. If Pesutto had become bankrupt then he would have been forced to resign a marginal seat that the Liberals risked losing to their rivals.
Labor has ruled in Victoria for all bar four years since 1999, but with a state debt of $167 billion and the worst youth crime figures since 2009, the Liberals should be a shoo-in to win next year’s state election.
But, as seen with the Pesutto-Deeming debacle, the party is far more concerned with internecine disputes between moderates and right-wing Christians.
Victoria is Australia’s least religious state, with just 43.8 per cent of its population claiming to be Christian in the 2021 census, while 42.1 per cent said they had no religion.
If Victoria’s Christian population were evenly distributed around the state, a party dominated by right-wing Christians might have a winning formula. But that’s not the case. While some suburbs have Christian majorities, one district is majority Muslim and others have significant minorities of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs.
And, of course, Christians are likely to spread their vote.
Brad Battin, who replaced Pesutto as Liberal leader, would like nothing better than to be able to attack Labor on rising crime. As a former police officer, he would be on solid ground.
But he can’t get the public and the media to concentrate on Labor’s inability to control public order or balance the books when his own side keeps offering a clown-show distraction.
As well as the battle between the right-wing and the moderates for control of the Liberals, Battin’s deputy leader Sam Groth was recently revealed to have stayed in what has been called “plush Melbourne hotels”, paid for by taxpayers, after attending high-profile sporting events.
One of Groth’s colleagues told the Herald Sun newspaper that “taking free tickets to events and taking your wife and booking a fancy hotel room in the city won’t sit well with the public in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis”.
In the meantime, the Labor Party gets on with ruling a state with increasing debt and rising crime, crossing its fingers and hoping that the Liberals continue to fight among themselves.
