Liberals brace for impact as Cyclone Moira makes landfall

Sydney Morning Herald

5 days ago

Barring a last-minute change of heart from the people controlling the finances of the Victorian Liberal Party or the Cormack Foundation, an investment fund established for the party's benefit, its destructive forces will be unleashed on Deeming's party room colleagues, her leader Brad Battin, and the party she was elected to represent.
Deeming, like any successful litigant, is entitled to recover legal costs owed to her. But if we step out of the courtroom and return to our essential wisdom in politics, this is not a course of action a parliamentarian would normally take.
Imagine you are a state MP. If a lawyer, in this case defamation lawyers Patrick George and Rebekah Giles, suggested a way to recover costs that would plunge your party into crisis, force an unwanted byelection and remove any reasonable prospect of forming government after the next state election, would you agree to do it?
The difference with Deeming is that she no longer considers the people who make up the parliamentary ranks of the Victorian Liberal Party her party, if indeed she ever did.
She said as much last week during a podcast with Club Grubbery, an obscure media site run by a paramedic sacked for refusing the jab and a former Qantas pilot turned anti-lockdown campaigner.
Over an hour-long discussion, she talked as a guerilla fighter might about the need to seize control of the Liberal Party and its direction. 'I am not satisfied with the government in this country flipping from Liberal to Labor when neither of them represents anything that I can see as good,' she remarked.
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Deeming's ultimate mission is not to return the Victorian Liberal Party, in its current form, to government. It is to remake it in her ideological image.
In this world, parliamentary colleagues who hold to the traditional values of the party are enemies rather than allies. 'If they succeed in getting me out of here it is not as though the Moira Deeming problem will disappear,' she said.
What then, should Liberal leader Brad Battin do about the Moira Deeming problem?
There is no shortage of advice. Some colleagues want him to bend the knee to Charles Goode, an octogenarian stockbroker who, as Cormack Foundation chairman, sits Smaug-like on its $110 million corpus, and plead for the foundation to cover Pesutto's costs.
Others say the money should come from the party itself, given Pesutto was sued for things he said while leading it.
Battin's instinct is to do nothing. Earlier this week, one of his MPs, Brad Rowswell, requested a party room meeting to discuss Pesutto's impending bankruptcy and the prospects of a byelection in Hawthorn. Battin made it clear that he wanted to keep talking about machete bans and cuts to stamp duty – not an internal party dispute.
This was before news broke in Wednesday's The Australian about Deeming's legal gambit to make former premiers Jeff Kennett, Ted Baillieu and Denis Napthine and Liberal colleagues Georgie Crozier and David Southwick pay for Pesutto's sins.
A Federal Court will ultimately decide whether this is a Hail Mary by Deeming's lawyers or a new hell for a party that has lost six of the past seven Victorian state elections.