Moira Deeming Loses Vote To Rejoin Liberal Party

Independent Victorian MP Moira Deeming will not be rejoining the party room of the Victorian Liberals after members cast their votes this morning.

A motion in favour of Deeming’s readmittance to the party was put forward by Renee Heath, Joe McCracken, Chris Crewther, Richard Riordan and Bill Tilley, who had argued she had been unfairly expelled in 2023.

The vote was deadlocked at 14-14, with leader John Pesutto using his casting vote to vote the motion down.

However, party rules stated that Deeming needed an absolute majority of 16 votes to be successful.

“The constitutional requirement applies in any event that an absolute majority of 16 is required … it overrides everything else,” said Pesutto to media following the meeting.

Vote came after Deeming found “innocent”

Deeming was exiled from the party in May 2023, after Neo-Nazis crashed a rally held by anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen. Keen co-hosted her “Let Women Speak” rally outside Victorian Parliament, advocating for “women’s sex based rights”, which was supported by far right extremist group Binary Australia, and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Deeming, who used her first speech in Parliament to express her anti-trans and anti-sex worker sentiments, helped organise and spoke at the event.

The rally was stormed by a group of Neo-Nazis, who performed the Nazi salute and chanted “white power” on the steps of Parliament.

While Deeming condemned the group at the time, she was expelled from the Victorian Liberal party after she refused to denounce the event and its organisers as being extremist, Nazi sympathisers.

Deeming suit Pesutto for defamation after he inferred she was a Nazi sympathiser.

She won the case earlier this month, with Pesutto having to pay $300,000 in damages.

Party split down the middle

Pesutto described the hour-long meeting as “long and civil”, and was adamant that this would conclude the matter of Deeming’s party membership.

Richard Riordan, who was a signatory of the motion said he was “flabbergasted” by the result.

“We are in a worse position than we were to start with in the sense it’s not resolved, our party room is split down the middle,” he said

Shadow Cabinet Secretary Ann-Marie Hermans said that the meeting was “very sombre”.

“Most people did not want to speak,” she said.

“I personally don’t think we have resolved it by having a close vote … internally we will have a lot more work to do.”

Gender-critical supporters of Deeming were aghast at the result online.

Angie Jones, who had her own defamation case against Pesutto, called the Opposition leader “an abusive man who weaponised his power to maliciously defame innocent women with few consequences compared to the devastation he has caused us.”