There is something truly detestable about backroom “powerbrokers” who think that democracy is a toy to be played with. An eternal game. They are “chirruping sectaries” (as the late American conservative philosopher Russell Kirk might have called them) who scurry about in the shadows, giving our elected representatives their permission to exist and to prosper. Or not.
Is there anything more disgusting than the Victorian Liberal Party? Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate political science student, the textbooks used to say that Victoria was “the jewel in the Liberal Party’s crown”. Yes, they were always Deakinites, but they were kind-of liberal. And they governed on a regular basis. God knows what those 1970s academic pundits would make of things south of the Murray today.
The Liberal Party there is simply a rolling disaster, in every way and at every level. Since 1999 – yes, the last century – and the premiership of Jeff Kennett, who mistook razing government services to the ground for governing, the Liberals will have been in office, by the time of the next election due in November 2026, for a grand total of three years out of twenty-seven. If they were stocks, you wouldn’t be buying them.
The Daniel Andrews statue episode drew a Liberal Party response that merely lamented the “waste of taxpayer money” while Victorians were suffering from crippling cost pressures. This shows the spine, smarts and rhetorical verve of a dead fish. It is just the latest in a long line of opportunities missed and own goals. The statue moment was squandered. I guess when you elevate infighting to the level of top political priority, you cannot expect much in the way of electoral success. More on this anon.
Yes, the Khmer Rouge on the Yarra makes Moscow on the Molonglo (aka Canberra) look like a Hayekian seminar group. It is leftie central. China thought that Daniel Andrews went too far during Covid. Melbourne is the city of people who dress forever in black and paint giant silos with images of Jacinda Ardern. The city of the Parkville Asylum, aka The University of Melbourne. Of gun-toting political police who mow down innocent anti-vaxxer dissidents but leave the terrorist-adjacent types brandishing black, white and green flags free to roam the streets, attacking both police and (unconscionably), their horses.
It is a hard road to hoe for those right-of-centre. No argument there. But …
The latest imbroglio involves a former Liberal Party MP called Moira Deeming. Deeming was pre-selected for the Upper House a few years back when the Liberals, in their wisdom, shafted the excellent Bernie Finn for having the temerity to welcome the end of Roe v Wade stateside and of instant, nationally endorsed abortion rights there.
As The Guardian has reported:
Deeming, now an independent MP after her expulsion, is suing Pesutto for allegedly falsely portraying her as a Nazi sympathiser after she spoke at the Let Women Speak rally held on 18 March 2023 that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
Well, alleged neo-Nazis. They may well have been actors. But who cares? It was nothing to do with Deeming. The Liberals have been trying to pin something on Deeming for years. She is one woman that the Libs don’t wish to “let speak”.
As good looks in politics go, this public airing of internecine warfare isn’t one of them.
There is one common denominator in the decades long Victorian Liberal debacle and it has has a name. It is the ubiquitous Michael Kroger, the Liberal Party player’s player. Think Michael Photios or Christopher Pyne in their respective States, close mates of Kroger’s, I am told.
Kroger has been around forever. He is, like me, rising sixty-eight. He was once going to be an Australian prime minister. At least that was the idea among the Liberal pundits of the late twentieth century, in the days when John Howard was never good enough for the Liberals – he was from Sydney, after all – and outside saviours were looked for routinely. Kroger has been President of the Victorian Division. He is an establishment favourite. A former director of the Institute of Public Affairs. A fixture on Sky News, of course. And a perennial on election nights. A sort of Graham Richardson of the Liberals. That there aren’t better go-to guys for the legacy media says much about our polity.
Kroger has been married to former Senator Helen Kroger and to Andrew Peacock’s daughter Ann, without great longevity in each case. Rumours have linked him with other Liberal and Liberal-adjacent women. But everything has been about power politics, on a less-than-grand scale. It is Victoria we are talking about, for God’s sake. With apologies to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Victoria ain’t God’s political grandeur.
As well as having lost wives along the way, Kroger also famously fell out with his former buddy, Peter Costello. Two big egos, right there. Alan Jones was once quoted thus, some time back:
Broadcaster Alan Jones, with a daily national audience of up to 800,000 listeners, counts him as a great friend. ‘‘We talk all the time,’’ Jones says. ‘‘He’s a very good supporter. We’re pick and stick. We’re in the pick and stick club. We’re mates and we’ve got a little circle of friends and we stick with one another.’’
Pick and stick? Not with wives or best buddies, it seems, in Kroger’s case.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/flashback-1997-michael-kroger-the-player-20181201-p50jmm.html
Kroger slides with ease around the nation’s boardrooms. He remains an insider in an era when insiders are on the nose with the punters. An era where Lib-Lab political games are merely theatre that provides content for cable news. Kroger should be put out to pasture and be made to reflect on his long and politically undistinguished career and his serial, intra-party malfeasance. He is a dinosaur, and, given the Victorian Liberal Party’s hopeless record and near obsolescence, one can only wonder at his longevity as a public figure.
Kroger has also been an investment banker. With a firm called J T Campbell. Another endearing career move for the punters to remember. Think also Malcolm Turnbull.
Kroger’s political style – endless deals, fights and factions – apparently continues in his corporate life. One recent (April 2024) report noted:
A stoush over the future of a major childcare company has descended into acrimony as Liberal Party stalwart Michael Kroger pushes to oust enemy board members in an extraordinary shareholder meeting on Tuesday.
Ousting. He is always ousting someone. Always stoushes. An old profile in the Sydney Morning Herald once described Kroger as follows:
Michael Kroger is The Player. He punts, hedges, calculates, seduces, pulls strings. He goes for all the bases. Sport, the law, merchant banking, boutique investments, gold, diamonds, antiques and, of course, politics. He moves from one to the other with silky self-assurance, lighting up rooms, always listening, flattering, influencing. And nearly always prevailing.
There are those who wouldn’t trust him in a sun-drenched alley — they’ve seen the backroom manipulations behind the front-of-house charm. They’ve seen how many people’s stars have risen or fallen on his say-so. They know only too well how this Liberal Party wheedler and force majeure operates.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/flashback-1997-michael-kroger-the-player-20181201-p50jmm.html
A Liberal Party member from Victoria told me a few years back that there were at least seven factions down there. It makes the NSW and Queensland Divisions look like a UniParty. And the Victorian Liberals have been pursuing, for decades now, a Labor-lite strategy. As they say, keeping on repeating failed strategies and expecting a different result is the practice of knaves and fools.
Naturally, it has emerged that Kroger has been up to his armpits in the Moira Deeming affair:
The influential Liberal figure Michael Kroger claimed Moira Deeming had said “more crazy stuff over the years” as he urged the Victorian opposition leader, John Pesutto, to build a stronger case for her ousting from the party room, a court has heard.
Crazy stuff? What, being a conservative? Saying what ordinary people think? Defending their interests rather than those of UniParty elite types like Kroger? Valuing tradition? Deeming’s website says:
Prior to entering Parliament, Moira worked as a high school teacher for over a decade, teaching English, Literature, Legal Studies, Philosophy, Science and Psychology. She also served as a local Government Councillor for the City of Melton from 2020-2022.
She was prompted to run for Parliament to see individual rights and responsibilities balanced equally in law, and to ensure that the Government and its departments exist to serve individuals and families, rather than the other way around.
Moira’s priorities are to ensure that we have clear, fair laws that promote and protect justice, personal agency and community, rather than special interests or authoritarian governance.
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/members/moira-deeming/
Yeah, Kroger. Crazy stuff! Like thinking – err, knowing – that there are only two genders. We can’t have that.
Yes, these views are “controversial” within the Victorian Liberal Party, apparently. You are deemed (no pun intended) to be crazy if you follow the Book of Genesis, the Christian catechism and several thousand years of universally shared global beliefs. Calling someone controversial, and having that narrative embedded in the public consciousness, is the oldest trick in the propaganda book. Oh, and she has been against the so-called safe schools program, a radical grooming-of-children project thought up by the radicals at Latrobe University. (Check out Roz Ward on a non-corrupt search engine, if you can find one, for background). Ironically, Deeming is a graduate of Latrobe University.
Then, of course, there is Deeming’s opposition to abortion in all cases and to euthanasia. She was outstanding on the Covid tyranny, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moira_Deeming
For mine, this all makes Deeming a refreshing, courageous, right-thinking, grounded, stand-out hero. A rarity in the legacy parties. This whole sorry saga is all about the Liberals trying to maintain their presented face, their “messaging”, as “non-toxic”. Pesutto has even used that word. We all saw what the British Tories achieved by seeking to present themselves as post-toxic (aka post-Thatcherite). Years of ineffectual opposition (to Tony Blair) then over a decade of worse-than-ineffectual government.
Deeming’s real crime is that she is a hindrance to the Victorian Liberals’ never-ending quest to be woke, to appeal to the Melbourne in-crowd.
The demonisation of Deeming reminds me a little of the US Democrats’ treatment of Veep candidate J D Vance as “weird”. As Matt Walsh has noted in relation to the vice presidential debate:
Imagine how mystifying it must be for the normal American who has heard from the Dems that JD Vance is “weird” only to turn on the debate and see this totally calm, cool, well spoken and eloquent guy.
Source: Matt Walsh’s Telegram channel, 2 October 2024.
Vance isn’t weird and Deeming isn’t crazy. The problem, in each case, lies with the accuser. In Deeming’s case, Kroger. We could go further, and not only say that Vance and Deeming are neither weird nor crazy. In fact, they are each opposing things that are objectively evil. Bernard Carpenter at TCW says, again, in the context of the US election, which he sees (correctly) as a battle between good and evil:
… let me pose these two questions.
Is allowing a fully formed and healthy newborn baby to die alone of dehydration on a sterile white tray after an ‘unsuccessful’ abortion evil?
Is mutilating a confused and troubled child, castrating it or removing its breasts, evil? People with lots of letters after their names call it ‘gender-affirming care’, which is in the running for the ugliest euphemism coined thus far in the present century. (The uglier the thing, the uglier the euphemism?)
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/trump-versus-harris-is-quite-simply-good-versus-evil/
There is little doubt how Moira Deeming would answer. It is equally clear to me on which side Kroger and his puppet Pesutto are lining up. Kroger’s advice to Pesutto, revealed in the ongoing defamation case, continued:
“John, between us you need to strengthen the case against her,” Kroger, a former Victorian Liberal party president whose conservative faction opposed Deeming’s 2022 preselection, wrote to Pesutto on 20 March 2023.
Kroger had also suggested Pesutto speak to Ian Quick, a member of the Liberal party’s powerful administrative committee, who he said knew “people who can find anything on the internet even long deleted stuff”, the court heard.
“You need to be an expert to find deleted stuff. Moira will herself also have said even more crazy stuff over the years,” Kroger wrote.
Pesutto replied: “Agree. We are working on building further material in. Thanks again for your support on this.”
As Rebel News reports, this is just about digging up dirt. On someone on one’s own side. I just wish we could delete Kroger’s malign influence on politics in the Garden State, or whatever they call Victoria these days.
https://www.rebelnews.com/liberal_powerbroker_urged_pesutto_to_find_more_crazy_stuff_on_deeming
Then there is this.
Pesutto, under cross-examination, denied any wrongdoing or that offers were made to MPs to influence their votes on Deeming’s ousting.
IBAC (the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission), anyone? There is now the stench of corruption, on top of the immorality, zero people skills, malevolence and a total lack of political smarts. As I often say, it is the Victorian Liberal Party we are talking about. Three years in government out of the last twenty-seven.
Ironically, as Moira Deeming has said, “all I ever wanted was an apology”.
https://defenddeeming.com.au/
Really.
Why dredge all this material up about someone (Kroger) that most Australians, certainly those under the age of forty, would never have heard of? Well, sadly, he still matters, because his one, ongoing lifelong passion, the Victorian Liberal Party, is forever a crock of you know what, and Victoria is a totalitarian basket case, and the Liberal Party is still, alas, His Majesty’s Opposition. On Kroger’s watch.
More importantly, there is a Manichean battle of good versus evil going on at present, and these buffoons on the Yarra are engaged in their silly games and eating their own, destroying the good guys (and girls), instead of recognising the battle and manning up to fight it, both in Victoria and globally.
Oh, and one piece of advice for the goon, John Pesutto. When you are balding, don’t ever use gel to spike up what little hair you have left.
Paul Collits
2 October 2024
I didn’t know that about Michael Kroger. I did hear him say that Pesutto was basically a nice guy. I thought that was odd, given Pesutto’s behaviour after the Let Women Speak rally.
The neo Nazis had to be a plant - policemen is the best explanation so far. The lack of curiosity from journalists is strange.
Kroger did go to Israel and the sight of the massacre. That was a plus for me.
I am exceedingly disappointed that Kroger advised Pesutto to go after Moira Deeming.
Brilliant- 100% correct! How did the Liberal Party turn itself into basically a hard leftist internationalist organization spouting all the neo Marxist, post modernist and green agenda propaganda and viewpoints? Why does it continue to exist and can it be redeemed? It is no longer the Liberal Party and nor can it be said to be centre right. It is a left of centre party plain and simple.
Apart from a handful of Libs at the Federal level (one of whom is being put down the Senate list so he is kicked out), the Fed opposition is not a lot better!
Peter Dutton is slightly better than the incumbent PM but will continue to encourage the growth of big government, high taxes, a bloated welfare state, will not protect civil liberties, and will follow the US neo con foreign policy. We are all doooomed!