A Westerly in Spring

The man who won't be Premier of Victoria.

On the 27^th of December in Spring Street Melbourne, while the state of Victoria was literally on fire, Victorian Liberals were hard at work re-instating Moira Deeming to the Victorian Parliamentary Liberal Party and changing their leader from former lawyer, John Pesutto, to former copper, Brad Battin.

At the centre of the change was the December 12 Federal court judgement of Justice O’Callaghan in the defamation case of Deeming V Pesutto. John Pesutto was not only found to have defamed Moira Deeming, but to have behaved in a shameful and dishonest manner toward Mrs Deeming around her expulsion from the Parliamentary Liberal Party in May 2023.

It all went wrong for the man who would be alternative Premier of Victoria, in an initial move of poor judgement, and then a seemingly relentless adoption by Pesutto of terrible advice. This was not a solo performance by Mr Pesutto, he formed part of a choir of powerful players that aimed to reform the Liberals into a more progressive looking operation.

In 2022 the Victorian Liberals convincingly lost what many thought was an unlosable election, to political master and uber progressive Victorian Labor leader Dan Andrews. Andrews had presided over brutal and inhuman lockdowns during Covid.

In a May 2023 tweet, Liberal MP James Newbury perfectly encapsulated the feeling of the Liberal party moderates, when Moira Deeming was being expelled. He said, a “line in the sand” was being drawn and that John Pesutto and his team were going to “clean house” and “modernise the Party”, with the aim of winning against Labor in 2026.

The new look Liberal Party was exposed in court, when Liberal MPs and staffers including MP’s David Southwick and Georgia Crozier and former MP Dr Matthew Bach, took the stand in Deeming V Pesutto to join his fanciful song that they were fighting Neo-Nazi, white supremacist and ethno-fascist views, by ousting Moira Deeming. Counsel for Pesutto argued that the far-right associations of Deeming were clear in her political connections with people who objected to trans ideology, and strangely, in her opposition to paedophilia. The argument, when laid out, was called by Justice O’Callaghan “a very, very long bow”, and ultimately “dishonest”.

The extreme right elements of the party, that Pesutto and his moderates were cleaning out, never existed; they were invented by Daniel Andrews and his media team, and shielded by a willing and corrupt progressive media. Unfortunately for them, Moira Deeming was a sacrifice to an emperor who was already being stripped bare before the Victorian people.

John Pesutto came forward with his part-progressive Liberal vision, just as the mood of the electorate was turning against cancel culture, when the science of Covid lockdowns was being disproven, when establishment media was being treated with distrust, when government overspending was hitting the mortgage belt, and when, what has become known as “woke” politics, was going out of fashion like fluorescent socks in 1986.

To add to the spiral, Pesutto’s advisers didn’t factor in the change of guard on Twitter/X. Dr Matthew Bach testified for Pesutto’s defence, that he was a regular Twitter user when he was in politics, and accounts that he followed and respected had labelled Moira Deeming “anti-trans”.

Had Dr Bach and his parliamentary colleagues been a little more in touch with the changing guard on the new X, they may have noticed that without the censorship, the narrative of calling women Nazis for opposing gender identity ideology, the one that Justice O’Callaghan so easily saw through, was unsustainable.

Gender critical people, of the type that Daniel Andrews and his activists, called “nazis”, were amongst the most heavily censored people on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, at the height of Andrews’ power. However, on Elon Musk’s X, a mix of right, left and centre accounts were being freed to speak in early 2023, and many put their support behind Deeming, not just on “women’s issues”, but in defence of classic liberal values, values that are meant to underpin the Liberal Party of Australia.

Maybe Pesutto’s team thought that nobody would support a “fringe” group of women’s rights activists with child safeguarding concerns, but Deeming’s unjust expulsion was taken up by a broader movement against woke political culture.

After the judgement on the 12^th of December, John Pesutto tried to return to work as Liberal leader in Victoria, seemingly unaware that the trial had been public and that everyone knew a Federal Court Judge had confirmed he used slander for political gain.

Pesutto and his team of supporters found they could almost control the party room, after winning a vote to keep Moira Deeming out on the 20^th of December, but they couldn’t post anything on X without being challenged by people who were essentially on their own side.

It became clear, after the Deeming V Pesutto judgment, that it wasn’t just John Pesutto that people didn’t like, but the weak centrist compromise that has been failing to give voters an alternative to the authoritarian left around the world.

The “trans” issue consistently exposes the weakness of the “moderate” or “centrist” position, between new cultural incantations of the left and right. There is no middle ground between sex being a real and important category that women need in law and policy, and “woman” being a performance that men can enact in women’s change rooms and sport. The gender and sex debate is not a “cultural issue”, as commentators are continuing to call it, because sex is material in life, it is only deemed cultural by governments who refuse to protect female bodies.

I am left wondering why nobody gave Pesutto the basic political counsel that there is no benefit to be gained from angering your own side for votes that you are never going to win. The dyed in the wool lefties are never going to vote for the Liberals around the trans issue, and the actual persuadable are never going to be persuaded by the Liberals compromising on sex based rights, and slandering a women for telling the truth.

What the Liberal Party of Victoria should have been seeking, were the actual middle, the actual centre, the actual moderates.

What Pesutto and his backers missed, was that Moira Deeming appeals to the dead centre of Australian society, the mortgage belt, public school going, public hospital frequenting, public transport using, average Joannes. These dull, mostly off X people, are going to work and being ask by their employer who they are having sex with by Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI) surveys, they are being asked what their kid’s pronouns are on kindergarten sign-in sheets, and they are losing their privacy in workplace bathroom facilities.

While Victorians are at work, paying for their mortgage, their daughters are being groomed at school into anal sex and choking rituals. The “sex education” that Moira Deeming was being attacked in court for opposing, the university cooked “progressive” re-engineering of sexuality, is not just distributing misinformation about sex, it normalises prostitution to working class girls.

The “sex work is work” narrative, that is pushed by progressive governments, looks fine to Melbourne elites who can pay for their children’s university tuition, but in the suburbs, poor girls are being told they can support themselves through university with Only Fans. Sex work, is work that has been designated for poor girls by university professors.

The class divide in the progressive narrative around sex is hard to see from Spring Street, but it’s obvious when you zoom out, just a little, from the glare of the St Kilda Pride Centre.

I know for a fact that these are the issues that Moira Deeming is being faced with in her electorate. That Moira listens to people, is why she has become popular. That John Pesutto did not listen to Moira Deeming, to use a Pretty Woman reference, was a “big mistake”.

“The trend is your friend” is the other issue Pesutto could have been told, and he was years late for the “woke” trend. By the time a trend gets to the whisky swilling retirement circuit of Jeff Kennet, it’s unlikely to have a pulse. The trend against “woke” has been long brewing among the working and middle classes, and is likely to be the westerly breeze from the suburbs that brings the Liberals to victory in Victoria and possibly federally.

Hilariously, Kennet made a comment to The Australian, just a day after the ousting of his friend from the leadership, that “there is a lack of understanding among those commentating on politics”. That The Australian still take him seriously as a commentator is less funny.

Hopefully John Pesutto is going to his local café today realising that the non-binary kid preparing his coffee is not part of the disenfranchised proletariat, but more likely an engineering student who will take is fully intact reproductive system to Dubai in five years to make his fortune. On the other side of the tracks, the autistic working-class kid in Deeming’s electorate, may well be sucked into the Melbourne gender clinic to be misdiagnosed as a girl, only to be castrated by the state. These two theoretical people are not in the same class.

This is not a culture war, this is a class war, and it’s a war on women. What we are seeing in the Pesutto tale is a glimmer of hope.