Peta Cridlin The Daily Telegraph April 25, 2023
But while Peter Dutton seems determined to push back against political correctness, the Victorian Liberal Party keeps genuflecting to it. Last week the Moira Deeming saga took a new twist with Victorian Opposition Leader John Pesutto refusing to guarantee that Deeming would be re-admitted to the party room once her current suspension ends in nine months’ time.
It was always wrong to blame Deeming for the neo-Nazis who gatecrashed the women’s rights rally that she attended. What could possibly be objectionable in a Liberal MP asserting the right of women to have their own facilities, free from the presence of biological males claiming to be women?
Yet Pesutto was bluffed by Premier Daniel Andrews into treating a perfectly reasonable and measured defence of women’s rights as an exercise in hate speech. This is the kind of intellectual cowardice that makes people despair of the Liberal Party and turn to minor parties of the right, even though this just guarantees even worse Labor governments.
It’s hard not to feel Deeming has been scapegoated to save Pesutto’s leadership after his move to expel her collapsed the moment she told her colleagues that her own personal history as a child sex abuse survivor was what motivated her to protect the rights of women and girls. Add in the fact she was part-raised by a Holocaust survivor and Pesutto’s charge that she had neo-Nazi sympathies was dead. By the end of the meeting, the expulsion motion was withdrawn and, instead, the party room resolved that Pesutto and Deeming would issue a joint statement exonerating her of the charge of bringing the party into disrepute, and that she would be automatically re-admitted once her suspension period was up.
I know this to be true because I have confirmed this account with over 10 witnesses in the room, and a member of the party room had read me the official minutes.
When I interviewed Deeming last Tuesday, in her first and only television interview about her suspension, I was surprised to find no joint statement has ever been issued. And on radio last week, Pesutto refused to confirm Deeming’s right to return to the party room at the end of her suspension. To say Liberal Party supporters are angry is an understatement.
If the Liberal Party wants a policy that would impress both philosophical liberals, who believe in free speech, and instinctive conservatives, who object to the denial of biological facts, it would declare that all government documents and all public institutions would stop cancelling women.
There would be no more weak capitulation to the trans-lobby with official references to “persons who menstruate” and “chest-feeding”. There would continue to be “women’s” hospitals and “maternity” units. Without any discrimination against trans-people, we would keep women’s toilets and changerooms for the exclusive use of women and girls. And our education system would respect biological fact, not activist fantasy, as would our sporting competitions, prisons and more.
1/ Moira Deeming. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Ascui
2/ Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Luis Ascui
3/ Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in Adelaide. Picture NewsWire/Dean Martin
Comment by Nelle- the Liberals will never make a comeback unless they quieten people like this man who is showing his ignorance and bias against Moira Deeming who was using her political voice to stand for women’s rights -it is past time that women’s rights should be returned to their position they have held for an age and women are protected from the absurdity of woke-as leader he should be held accountable and asked to step down as he has failed in the position-we need conservative voices and their common sense to be reinstated and the absurdity of woke obliterated
Nelle's journey 