In a normal political party, the idea that an MP who had sued the party leader for millions of dollars would then expect to be re-endorsed for the next election would be dismissed as a bad joke. But the Liberal Party is no longer a normal political party.
So Moira Deeming, who set the ball rolling three years ago for the destruction of then-leader John Pesutto, duly put her name forward again for Liberal preselection for her Western Metropolitan region in advance of this year’s Victorian state election. Sanity, however, prevailed for once: yesterday she was defeated in a ballot for top spot on the ticket, reportedly by 39 to 26. Having seen which way the wind was blowing she declined to contest the number two position.
There is now a widespread expectation that Deeming will follow Barnaby Joyce and Cory Bernardi and defect to One Nation. She would certainly be a good fit; no-one familiar with the Liberal Party would be surprised that she went into the preselection vote with endorsements from Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin. Alternatively she may choose to retire content, leaving the party a smouldering ruin behind her.
Deeming may have been a bridge too far, but there is no sign of the party making any general attempt to dissociate itself from the far right. Renee Heath – who Pesutto’s predecessor, Matthew Guy, had promised to exclude from the Liberal party room for her extremism – was re-endorsed last week atop the ticket for Eastern Victoria, and Bev Macarthur won top position on Saturday for Western Victoria. The only other sign of moderation was that Ann-Marie Hermans was demoted to number two in South-Eastern Metropolitan.
When Jess Wilson took the Liberal leadership last November I warned against seeing her as a progressive, while noting that “she is about as close to it as the party will now tolerate.” Her task as she sees it is to paper over the party’s ideological cracks as much as possible, and it’s no doubt with that end in view that she publicly backed all of the MPs seeking re-endorsement, including Deeming and the rest.
But as this month’s South Australian election demonstrated, the party ultimately cannot avoid making a choice. Is it on the same side as the far right, or isn’t it? If it keeps trying to fudge the question it will be mown down from both sides. Yet while the party’s right is crystal clear about what it wants (even if many there will be happy enough to see the back of Deeming), its opponents are still in denial about what’s at stake.
Coincidentally, the same paper that brought the news of Deeming’s defeat contains an op-ed piece by George Brandis. It’s not ostensibly about the Liberal Party; it’s a critique of Donald Trump’s operations in the Middle East. But it illustrates the cognitive dissonance within the party: while Brandis is warning of the threat that Trumpism poses to civilisation, his centrist ally in Victoria is cheerfully re-endorsing her own Trumpists.
With the election only eight months off, there’s no prospect of this changing. The lesson the party should have taken from Pesutto’s failure was that it had to be clear-eyed about the nature of the conflict, rather than wishing itself – as Pesutto evidently had – back in the 1980s. Instead it took the opposite lesson: that the surrounding unpleasantness was so great that all it could do was bury its head even deeper in the sand.
The World is Not Enough 