Is Deeming V Pesutto over?

It's unlikely.

I’ve made the point more than once that I am not a journalist, I am a researcher, an opinion writer, and a political commentator; nonetheless, I have covered the Moira Deeming case in Australia with more attention than most journalists. I knew Moira from women’s activism circles before she was a MP, not well, but as a person with similar views and objectives.

The thing about the gender-critical women’s movement, is that there are people with different motives, and over time, motives are tested and can be revealed to be facile. I have recognised a few core values in Moira that are unlikely to be swayed. Like myself, Moira is a survivor of child sexual abuse, and those experiences teach a person about vulnerability in a way they will never forget.

Also like myself, Moira is a woman of Christian faith. Christians come in different flavours, but I knew from speaking to Moira that she was not sympathetic with the right-wing Christian approach, and had become more swayed by the old left class approach to the politics of women’s rights and gender insanity. Like me, Moira comes from a Labor family.

Moira is steadfast but not infallible; she is a very flesh-and-blood human, and a woman who has been under tremendous stress. Moira has maintained an outward consistency and an obvious level of focus, but there have been times when I wondered if she might pack up her bat and ball, and ride away in the sunset with her husband and babies.

I began writing about the Deeming V Pesutto issue in March 2023, after the fallout from the Let Women Speak Rally in Melbourne.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/let-women-speak-event-hijacked-clowns-to-the-left-of-moira-nazis-to-the-right/

I have followed the case here and in The Spectator through her sacking from the Parliamentary Liberal Pary, through her public defamation trial, through her vindication and reinstatement. It has been exhausting to watch, and I can’t imagine what it was like to live through.

The latest news is that Mr Pesutto, unwilling to sell assets to pay court-mandated legal fees and avoid impending bankruptcy proceedings, has secured a 1.5 million dollar loan from the Liberal Party to settle the matter. This debt the liberal party are financing, was money Moira had to pay lawyers to defend herself from horrifically defamatory accusations, accusations that she was a Nazi and a Fascist. This money was ordered by a Federal Court Judge to be paid by Pesutto because he publicly slandered Moira.

At this point, the reader would expect me to fly into a reasonably articulate tirade, but I’m left aghast. for your benefit and for my therapy, I’ll explain what happened, as if we are both 10-year-olds.

The leader of an Australian political party was frightened of his powerful and vile political enemy. The leader’s enemy was preparing to attack a member of the leader’s team for attending a women’s rights rally, where women expressed mainstream opinions. To avoid the scorn of his enemy, the “leader” publicly attacked the woman with career-ending accusations.

The main accusation that the leader made against the woman and her associates was that the women’s rights activists were like a political group who had murdered people in gas chambers and started WWII. The woman was then sacked and roundly condemned by the media for attending and participating in the “Nazi adjacent” women’s rights rally.

This woman, let’s call her Moira, then had to find wealthy supporters to mount a massively expensive defamation case with the best lawyers in the country, just to make sure that when her great grandchildren read about her, it wasn’t that she was an actual Nazi, but a woman who thought women should be entitled to rights such as single sex political assembly, same sex service provision and single sex sport.

Then the good judge decreed that the evil leader, let’s call him John, had not only defamed Moira and all the women’s rights activists but had done so in a calculated, dishonest, and malicious manner. The judge listen to all the women speaking and decided that they were not Nazis but women’s rights activists, with mainstream opinions. John tried to pretend it was all a terrible mistake and continued to keep Moira exiled from The Party for being disruptive to the team.

When the people who vote for The Party said “what the fuck John?”, The Party made sure John was removed from his leadership, but not from The Party. In fact, The Party, let’s call it the Liberal Party, has now partially paid the money John owed Moira’s expensive lawyers, in order to keep John in his seat, out of bankruptcy and in the Liberal Party.

And now Moira is to be quiet like a good girl and pretend nothing happened. What I have learned about Moira, is that she is a principled woman, but she is not a good girl.

Astoundingly, female Liberal moderates, who are on the side of John, are now saying that, in order to fix its “women problem”, the Liberal Party should have quotas. I can’t tell you how stupid these women sound, from my perspective.

I don’t even know how to finish this post, except to give the Liberal Party another piece of advice that they will ignore. You can’t treat women like this and expect to appear to be a decent option to women in the mortgage belt. Women who vote are also compelled to work to pay their mortgage. Working women have to compete in the workplace with men, these women value their professional reputation and don’t want their reputations destroyed by vicious, ambitious, and spiteful men. Mortgage belt voters recognise John, he is many men that women work with and for, and if the Liberal Party doesn’t sack him, which they clearly won’t now, they send a message that a thousand quotas are not going to fix.