The lies of John Pesutto.

How powerful men protect predators.

Sheldon Cooper, a character from The Big Bang Theory, repeats the line that he is not insane, because his mother had him tested. Thanks to last week’s Judgement in Deeming V Pesutto, Australian gender critical feminists can say we are not far-right for raising safeguarding concerns, the Federal Court of Australia has had us tested. Common arguments levelled at women by the establishment left, were presented to the Federal Court in Deeming V Pesutto, with the best Lawyers that grotty political money can buy, and they all failed.

Justice O'Callaghan delivered a short and decisive judgment in the Federal Court last week that was expanded on in a lengthy decision published on the court website. Justice O'Callaghan found that Moira Deeming was defamed, in proven imputations made in five publications by the leader of the Victorian Liberal Party, John Pesutto.

The essence of the defamatory statements made about Mrs Deeming was that she was unfit to be in the Parliamentary Liberal Party and the Liberal Party, because she knowingly associated with Neo-Nazis and Nazis, sympathised with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. and helped promote Nazi, white supremacist and ethno-fascist views.

Pesutto’s legal team did not deny the imputations were defamatory, what they attempted to establish was that, at the time of the five publications in question, Mr Pesutto was expressing honest opinion, that he believed himself to be acting in the public interest, and that he was covered by “common law qualified privilege”, and the very post-modern sounding “contextual truth”. All defences failed.

In what Justice O’Callaghan called a “shameful state of affairs”, Pesutto gave evidence under oath that Moira Deeming had a pre-existing reputation in the Liberal party for “giving succor to hateful and/or extreme social and or political views”.

Justice O'Callaghan ruled that this statement about Mrs Deeming’s reputation was gratuitously offensive, shameful, dishonest and untrue, and was designed to thwart arguments that Mrs. Deeming “suffered serious harm as a consequence of the impugned publications”.

However, Deeming V Pesutto was not just a case about one man lying about one woman, or the case wouldn’t have attracted the money it cost to run.

Pesutto's team attempted to establish that there was an ideological link between the expressed safeguarding concerns of Deeming and her associates, and the anti-LGBTQ sentiments that are popular on the far-right.

The case was set largely at the scene of the Melbourne Let Women Speak Rally, on the steps of Parliament House, that Moira Deeming attended in March 2023. Neo-Nazis crashed the event carrying a banner saying “destroy pedo freaks”.

The three important parts of the argument in defence of Pesutto were that neo-Nazis attended the rally to support of the Let Women Speak, that the women’s event was “anti-trans”, and that the neo-Nazi banner was self-evidently referring to trans people. Witness after witness for Pesutto indicated that these were obvious facts, and that it was self-evident that “pedo freaks” referred to trans people.

Justice O’Callaghan established early in the case that the connections between the “pedo freaks” and trans people, was not obvious to him, and he was not aware of the salient points in the broader gender critical debate. In some ways this made him a perfect judge for the case.

So it began, Australia’s most highly regarded defamation lawyer, Dr Matthew Colins KC and his high-priced team went about making the case, in a lengthy trial, that there was a known and established ideological link between the arguments of gender critical women, and far-right political ideologies, relating their mutual objection to paedophilia in trans people. I think this may have been what they called “contextual truth”.

To give some “context”, from my own perspective, I will outline what the gender critical feminist argument are (in simple terms), in regard to safeguarding and trans identification.

Because almost all violent sexual offenses (97-99%) are perpetuated by men, single sex spaces are as effective a barrier to sexual predators, as, for example, a condom is in preventing pregnancy. Single sex safeguarding is a crude but effective and widely used barrier method against predators for women and children internationally.

Like barrier contraceptives, single sex safeguarding is only as effective as the barrier, or boundary. Where a safeguarding boundary is breached, paedophiles will gather, this is a known fact about predators. It is not that tans identification is paedophilia, it is that the trans rights claim to sex self-identification breaches the legal boundary of sex that women need to protect themselves and children in society and law. The boundary for single sex safeguarding is not against predators but against all men, a small proportion of which, will be predators.

Trans identity does not change sex, and trans identity is not a contra indicator to male pattern sexual deviancy. Therefore, it is unsafe to expect women and children to allow males past a sex-based boundary because of a trans identity.

The neo-Nazi ideology is much more simple. Far right extremists claim that gender non-conformity and homosexuality, are by definition sexual deviancy. All gender critical women mentioned in the case openly disavowed this position.

Former Liberal minister Dr Matthew Bach testified under oath in Deeming V Pesutto that he was concerned about how “strident” Mrs Deeming was about women’s rights issues, and that she had gained an anti LGBTQ reputation in certain “communities”. The prime example Mr Bach used in his statement was his recollection of being interviewed on LGBTQ radio Joy FM, where he was asked about Mrs Deeming’s alleged comments that the “Safe School Program had been devised by paedophile apologists”.

On the stand, Bach stated with dramatic disgust that “of course that is such a toxic and dreadful and common trope regarding members of the LGBT community.” Bach’s pearl clutching theatrics, echoed the Pesutto team line that when certain women talk about paedophiles, they really mean “trans people”.

Mrs Deeming’s Lawyer Ms Chrysanthou asked Dr Bach if he was aware that the Deputy Director of the unit at Latrobe University, that had developed Safe Schools, had previously written a lengthy article about paedophilia. Dr Bach said that he was not, but he must have known at that moment that he was being led into a trap, from which he was in no position to escape.

“Were you aware”, Chrysanthou asked Dr Bach, “that the Deputy Director of the unit at Latrobe that developed Safe Schools had stated effectively that the love of a paedophile for children equates with the love of a parent?” Dr Bach was not aware.

Sue Chrysanthou then read from a 1982 article, written by the former Deputy Director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at Latrobe University. The material in the article was so vile and shocking, that no person could have denied it to be paedophile apology.

Chrysanthou calmly went in for the jugular and asked Dr Bach, self-confessed champion of the Safe School program and LGBTQ rights, if the text could rightly be described as paedophilia apology? Dr Bach described the text that was read out as “utterly odious” and agreed that it was in fact paedophilia apology.

In the final days of the hearing, a junior counsel on Mr Pesutto’s team, Mr Dexter, attempted to explain to the judge the relevance of a video being played in court which showed Mrs Deeming’s statements about the controversial Safe Schools program, where she claimed it was “destroying children’s healthy boundaries with adults”, and described the program as “paedophilic garbage”.

Mr Dexter said that the video was relevant because it established the “ideological link” between Deeming’s opposition to Safe School’s and the anti paedophilia rhetoric in the extreme-right, supporting Pesutto’s defence of honest belief and contextual truth. Again, there were three steps to this strange argument.

1. The Safe Schools program “is known to be, in part, about forms of teaching for LGBTQI+”.

2. The “ neo-Nazis who attended the rally” with “a banner that said ‘destroy pedo freaks’.

3. After the rally Ms Jones (an organiser of the rally) posted a tweet saying “women and nazis want to get rid of pedo filth, why don’t you?”. (Ms Jones denies that by “pedo filth” she meant trans people.)

After calling the argument outlined by Mr Dexter a “very, very long bow”, Justice O’Callaghan, raised the issue that the article tendered from the former Deakin academic was “perverse to say the least”, and he would be contextualising the criticism that Moira Deeming’s made of Safe Schools as “mild”, in light of that evidence. Justice O’Callaghan said that Mrs Deeming’s use of the word “garbage” in this broader context was an “understatement”.

What O’Callaghan gave Moira Deeming that John Pesutto did not, and that gender-critical women are failing to receive in Australia, is a fair hearing.

The rhetoric is used by Pesutto and his colleges, by the ABC, by the Age and the Nine papers and by the progressive left, referring to women with safeguarding concerns as “anti-trans” and “far-right”, sits atop a flimsy scaffold that was easily taken apart by Justice O’Callaghan.

The arguments presented at Deeming V Pesutto are the very best arguments that money can buy, against some prominent advocates for single sex safeguarding. This trial will cost John Pesutto millions, and without more grubby donations, he could well face bankruptcy. Nobody could accuse Pesutto of not giving his slanderous lies, against a child safeguarding advocate, his very best shot.

People who support John Pesutto with donations and votes in the party room, are supporting these flimsy, dishonest, slanderous arguments against women who are trying to protect themselves and their children.

What we have in Pesutto’s arguments, that he has not disavowed, is a dangerous trope that women are bigots when they enforce sexual boundaries. Australian Women, like Moira Deeming and like Angela Jones, who have tried to raise issues about women’s sexual boundaries and safe boundaries around our children, are regularly called transphobes for refusing to believe that men change sex with magic words.

In the wake of the Trump victory, we have to acknowledge that people are getting sick of “woke” rhetoric, of which gender ideology is a key part. The establishment left are refusing to listen to the reasonable concerns of mainstream voters, and the Liberal Party should not ignore this opportunity to listen to women, when their opposition is not.

I listened to most of the Deeming V Pesutto hearing, and it reeked of superior Melbourne elites lecturing lowly women about how they are expected to behave in polite political society. Many men stood up in Pesutto’s defence, in the Federal Court of Australia, and linked women to Nazis for speaking about their sexual boundaries in a public place. This is indeed a shameful state of affairs.

It is notable that Pesutto has not apologised to Moira Deeming, and that the apology that he had previously given to women’s rights activists Angela Jones and Kellie-Jay Keen was pleaded away in the case, where he claimed it was made under complicated circumstances,

John Pesutto has shown no adjustment of his opinions that women with safeguarding concerns around gender identity are ideologically aligned with those who put Jews in gas chambers. I am not sure that Victoria deserves better, but the Liberal Party should insist on better, otherwise they must pack up their constitution and call it a day.