FORMER Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party leader John Pesutto has revealed his desperate attempts on behalf of his party to discard conservative principles and essentially become Teals – a party of urban progressives.
Speaking on the QandA program, Pesutto attempted to defend his actions that led to fellow Liberal MP Moira Deeming suing him for defamation. Pesutto lost and is now facing a legal bill of $2.6 million including $315,000 in damages.
Pesutto’s well-heeled Liberal friends in Victoria have managed to pledge $500k in a Gofundme campaign, that a few days ago had raised $146,185, or just 29% of the target.
Incidentally, one of the donations was $500 from by former Liberal and Teal bankroller Simon Holmes à Court. It’s pocket change for à Court but interesting that he would support a Liberal in trouble. Could his plan be to eventually merge his Teal movement with a “reformed” Liberal Party and ensure the “great green energy transition” that he is invested in?
It seems more likely Pesutto will be forced into bankruptcy and lose his seat of Hawthorn in the process. Media are now calling him “toxic” because the party has to choose between paying his bill or paying for another campaign if his seat is vacated.
Pesutto admitted on QandA that he could have handled the situation better but then went on to explain that he was only trying to “position the party as a party that is broad-based”. He also explained that the dispute arose because the party was “trying to mediate between competing rights when it comes to gender identity”.
In fact Pesutto was not trying to mediate at all. He was out to politically destroy Deeming because she took a stand against the so-called transgender rights movement invading women’s spaces, and helped organise a protest rally in Melbourne with UK women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker.
When a troop from the Australian Nationalist Movement gate-crashed the rally, Pesutto issued a press release stating his intention to expel Deeming from the party and implying it was because she associated with “neo-Nazis and white supremacists”.
Pesutto was desperate to assure the public that he represented a “tolerant and diverse” Liberal Party that had nothing to do with the rally and made Deeming an outcast, using the excuse that the Australian Nationalists were at the rally.
Deeming ended up being expelled from the parliamentary party and called herself a “Liberal independent”. Pesutto refused to back down or apologise to Deeming, prompting her to eventually take legal action.
Ironically, Pesutto would have us believe that his “broad-based” Liberal Party is a party of “inclusivity” in which you can believe this or you can believe that, as long as you’re not what the media calls “far right”. This idea was supported on QandA by another Liberal guest, Senator Dave Sharma.
Sharma, when he was the Member for Wentworth, lost his seat to Teal Allegra Spender, but has now been shunted into the Senate. It is no accident that Teals have been targeting Liberal-held seats. It is a divide-and-conquer strategy with billionaire greenie a Court at the helm.
A Court’s Teals and so-called Community Independents, are the “Chardonnay Socialists”. This is the group of comfortable urban upper and middle-class Australians trained in the ideology of DEI and soft-core environmentalism. They would call themselves “climate aware”, not quite Left enough to be Greens, but sympathetic to the LBGTIQ movement.
The Teals are difficult to distinguish from many Labor Party voters, although the latter are more likely to be aligned with the shop-floor unions and maintain the traditional view of “the working class”.
A large number of Liberals like Pesutto could sort out their ideological issues with conservatism and just go join the Teals. Otherwise this party will remain lost in the wilderness of compromise without conviction, direction or belief.