The Ayatollahs of the Victorian Liberal Party
Globally, there is currently more than enough evil to go around. Much of it is far from banal, to borrow yet again from Hannah Arendt and Adolf Eichmann.
But the Aussies cannot help themselves, too. And it doesn’t get any more banal than the morally and electorally pathetic Victorian Liberal Party. If ever an organisation was bereft of decency, it is them. To adapt a phrase much now in the news again, they are waging a veritable jihad on decency.
In his dying days as a Senator – at least for the moment – Gerard Rennick notes:
Moira Deeming says she was shocked to learn Victorian Liberal Party chiefs used party funds to bail out John Pesutto with a $1.55 million loan.
In a statement to The Australian, the Liberal MP revealed she had been told senior Liberal MPs and party officials originally backed a peace deal to settle Mr Pesutto's legal bill without using party funds in exchange for her guaranteed preselection.
Instead, Mrs Deeming said the party chose to rescue Mr Pesutto with internal funds at a meeting of the administrative committee on Thursday night.
Source: Gerard Rennick’s Telegram channel, 23 June 2025.
See also The Guardian:
Rennick goes on the make some pertinent yet obvious points about the Liberal Party. The working assumption is that the “heavyweights” of the Party – a total misuse of the word “heavyweight” – are bailing out Pesutto in order to avoid a losable by-election. What must the idiot Liberal donors be thinking? Money well spent, eh?
There are some serious questions. One is – why on earth is Moira Deeming still in the Liberal Party? Another is – why is anyone else? I guess the only reason any Victorian would ever vote for them would be because Labor’s stench finally became too great. But there is no guarantee the Liberals will pull it off in November 2026, of course. Labor might well have ditched Jacinta by then, and some of those new metro train lines might be operating. Daniel Andrews will have receded into the past. Even dim Victorian voters probably have weak memories for past evils and blunders.
Another question. Which of the remaining Liberal stalwarts outside Victoria will call out this latest atrocity and assault on our sense of decency? Even the appalling NSW Liberal Party never stooped this low. Never got into the toilet to this extent.
When it comes to ersatz ayatollahs, you couldn’t score better than Kroger the FOP (Friend of Photios), Baillieu, Kennett and what’s his name from Warrnambool. The other one. Yes, that’s it, Denis Napthine. He, like Baillieu, was Premier briefly, over a decade ago, after an absolutely fluke victory over the forgettable technocrat, John Brumby, in 2010.
Other than that brief period of office – you couldn’t call it “power” – the Liberals haven’t governed south of the Murray since the twentieth century, when, under Kennett, they went on a privatising, outsourcing spree that yielded very little that was good or lasting. That was the Liberals thinking they were consequential.
The Liberals’ incompetence since then has allowed the carpet-bombing of the state with windfarms, the corruption of the public service, the emergence of the dictator even the Chinese admired – the man who maims cyclists and locks up citizens – and the razing to the ground of what semblance of justice existed before Rob Hulls finished the job. The Liberals’ incompetence gave us get Pell, VicPol and Ashton’s circus, Lawyer X, a freed Tony Mokbel, the gangland wars, rubber bullets fired at the elderly, the tasering of the innocent, billions of dollars in public debt, vanity projects, the Covidisation of the whole population, migrant gangs and the destruction of a once truly great city. By a tyrannical brute and now the girlie running the show.
Yes, Labor did all that. Can you blame the Liberal Party for things that others did? Well, yes, you can. They haven’t once in twenty-six years put up meaningful resistance to the direction of ideological travel. They weren’t just content with being Labor Lite. They have been positively UniParty-esque. And, of course, they couldn’t figure out how to win elections.
Terry Barnes at the Australian Financial Review notes:
Accounting for one-quarter of Australia’s population and economy, when Victoria prospers, Australia prospers. But the Garden State is an overgrown, weed-infested tangle, governed by a fiscally incontinent Labor Party for most of the past 45 years.
Current premier Jacinta Allan presides over eye-watering debt and poor credit ratings; Australia’s highest-taxing regime; borrowing-funded and hugely over-budget infrastructure projects, including Melbourne’s never-never Suburban Rail Loop; resource-starved schools, hospitals, police and roads; and hard-left social policy.
Opinion polls say angry voters want to boot Labor. Yet Allan’s government almost certainly will be re-elected next year, and probably again in 2030 because its Liberal opposition is a political circus run by clowns.
Little to disagree with there. But is the moral stench of the thing that grabs you in this case.
They are a festering amalgam of petty, disgusting factions and navel-gazers content with feathering their own nests. And, clearly, given the events of the last week, they are now even more sleazy than ever. If that is even possible.
Last Thursday, an “upbeat” Pesutto said:
Tonight's an opportunity to square [the issue] off and put it all behind us.
Is this guy actually for real? You couldn’t make him up. Pesutto is a little like the Arthurian knight of Monty Python fame still insisting that what he has is “just a flesh wound”.
Deeming sees no end to the war in the Party. She said:
I assume that they will continue with their quest to try to annihilate me.
The SBS report continues:
In social media posts made following news of the bailout, Deeming wrote: "They failed to protect her when she was attacked .... They punished her for defending herself ... this is what institutional abuse looks like."
Of course they will. There is nothing the Victorian Liberal Party hates more than a gutsy conservative. They clearly hate Deeming far more than they hate Jacinta Allan.
But here is the kicker:
Victorian Opposition leader Brad Battin was among those who voted to support the deal.
Oh, deary me. This is the guy (no, not Matthew) that the Libs hope will bring them back to government. Clearly, he is merely captive to the ageing ayatollahs of the backrooms. A puppet.
And in no way worthy of even low office. Like the Premiership of the once middling State of Victoria. Where now we are used to a very pungent ordure emanating from Spring Street.
Paul Collits
23 June 2025
And the Federal Lib Party is almost as bad.
The right of centre are so fractured there is no opposition federally or in most of the states.
The Federal Lib party and most state Lib Parties are just Labor Lite parties, echoes of the Labor Party.
Why is Moira Deeming still a Liberal Party member indeed? She plainly has a strong stomach to continue association with that cabal of weasels. I thought deputy leader Groth might have brought some decency-perhaps he was just overruled?