Victoria’s opposition leader, John Pesutto, is facing calls to resign after a federal court found he defamed MP Moira Deeming in comments made after neo-Nazis gatecrashed a rally she helped organise.
Deeming, who was expelled from the Liberal party room in the months after the rally, has also demanded she be let back in as she said the judgment proved she had done “nothing wrong”.
As part of the damning judgement justice David O’Callaghan handed down on Thursday, Pesutto was ordered to pay Deeming $300,000 for the damage to her reputation he caused on five separate occasions after the Let Women Speak rally on 18 March 2023.
O’Callaghan found Pesutto’s comments in a media release conveyed she was “unfit to belong to the Victorian parliamentary Liberal party because she knowingly associates with neo-Nazis”, while an 3AW interview conveyed she “associates with Nazis”.
An ABC radio interview, meanwhile, conveyed she “knowingly associates or sympathises with neo-Nazis and white supremacists” while his press conference the day after the rally conveyed she worked with the rally organiser, Kellie Jay Keen, and others to “promote their odious Nazi agenda and their white supremacist and ethno-facist views”, O’Callaghan found.
O’Callaghan also found a dossier Pesutto created to justify her expulsion from the party room, conveyed she was likely to “bring discredit on the Victorian parliament … by organising, promoting and attending” the Let Women Speak rally.
Immediately following the judgment, the deputy premier, Ben Carroll, called on Pesutto to resign and said his integrity was “completely in shreds”.
“His position is untenable,” he told reporters. “He needs to do the right thing and resign.
“This has been a tawdry affair that has exposed the Liberal party as being divided.”
Guardian Australia understands several Liberal MPs are also urging Pesutto to resign, with his deputy leader, David Southwick, and leader in the upper house, Georgie Crozier, also told to “seriously consider their future.”
“John has to stand down immediately,” one MP said. “Unfortunately, there’s no coming back from something like this.”
Another said: “If he doesn’t resign, he’s going to be knifed, so wouldn’t he prefer to do it on his own terms?”
Deeming told reporters it was “cathartic” to read the judgment but it was not for her to say if he should resign.
However, she said she expected to be brought back into the Liberal party room.
“I was unjustly expelled. It makes sense to me that would happen,” Deeming said.
“I have every right to be there. I did nothing wrong.”
In his written reasons, O’Callaghan said Pesutto was driven to conduct a “media blitz” due to a “fear of the political damage that would be inflicted upon his fledgling leadership” by former premier, Daniel Andrews, “than by his professed concern that the party and the parliament would be brought into disrepute, as he claimed”.
While he did not come to the conclusion Pesutto was a dishonest witness, he said he was “infuriatingly unresponsive” during four days of cross examination and refused to “give a simple answer to simple enough questions”.
“I understand that when politicians are engaged in the cut and thrust of politics – facing tough questions in press conferences, for example – their job can involve deflecting questions, pivoting to another topic or running out the clock,” O’Callaghan wrote.
“But that is not the role of a witness in a court proceeding. Time and time again, Mr Pesutto gave lengthy and non-responsive answers to questions asked of him.”
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O’Callaghan described it as “shameful” that Pesutto claimed he knew “of no other person with such a bad reputation who has been allowed into the [Liberal] party” without a “skerrick of evidence to support it”.
O’Callaghan was also critical of Pesutto and Southwick for not disclosing the existence of a secret recording the Caulfield MP made of a meeting with Deeming on 19 March 2023.
“It is an extraordinary state of affairs that both of them sat by, knowing of the existence of the recordings, and said nothing,” he wrote.
And he said many issues canvassed by both Deeming and Pesutto’s lawyers were not relevant to the case but “took on a life of their own”.
While Pesutto planned to expel Deeming from the party room in March 2023, she ended up being suspended as part of a compromise. Weeks later, however, she was expelled for allegedly was “bringing discredit” on the parliamentary team by threatening legal action against Pesutto.
During the trial, which ran over three weeks, Deeming’s barrister, Sue Chrysanthou SC, argued Pesutto’s push to expel the MP from the party had “nothing to do” with the rally but were because of her views on “sex-based rights”.
Chrysanthou said Pesutto had created a “false narrative” that Deeming “associates with Nazis” to “as a pretext to just get rid of her”.
She said while Pesutto had never explicitly called Deeming a Nazi, an ordinary person would have inferred it based on his comments.
But Pesutto’s lawyer, Matthew Collins KC, rejected Chrysanthou’s theory and described it as a “conspiracy”.
He argued that Pesutto had done what any leader would do and distanced his party from a “vile” association with Nazis.
Despite the leadership speculation, the Coalition has overtaken Labor in the polls and is in an election-winning position for the first time in seven years.
