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Pesutto’s power gamble backfires as integrity takes a backseat in the Victorian Liberal Party.

One of Aesop’s fables tells of a jackdaw which tried to pass itself off as an eagle. Which leads us to Victorian politics. Leading a political party is by no means an easy task, and it should only be entrusted to those with certain skills and attributes, besides the obvious ones of verbal gymnastics. Plato is often cited, from ‘The Republic’, section 521, where he observed that ‘the only men to get power should be men who do not love it’.

On 20 December 2024, with the Liberal Party room locked at 14-all in deciding whether Moira Deeming should be readmitted to the inner sanctum of the progressive elite, their leader, John Pesutto, used his casting vote (he had already voted once) to keep her in the naughty corner. Actually, it was Pesutto who had painted himself into a corner of a different hue. It is not easy to keep up with it all, but a clear pattern has emerged.

The Opposition leader had maintained the fiction that Mrs Deeming was frolicking with neo-Nazis at a ‘Let Women Speak’ rally on 18 March 2023. But the Federal Court in December 2024 found that Pesutto had defamed Mrs Deeming on five occasions, and awarded her $315,000 in damages, with costs still to be decided. Pesutto’s Christmas was starting to look like it would have to take on Scrooge-like dimensions.

Rather than retell the sorry tale, it is worth drawing together some lessons for us all.

Four Lessons

The first is that so much of politics is driven by delusion. Pesutto has constantly tried to portray himself as a fighter. This is laughable — he was fearful of what Daniel Andrews and a compliant media pack would make of the neo-Nazis’ gate-crashing of the pro-women rally.

The second is that phony apologies are the bane of modern public life. Pesutto has just issued a prepared statement: ‘I again apologise to Mrs Deeming as we all work together to ensure the Liberal Party succeeds in winning government in November 2026.’ This comes from a man who had just used his casting vote to keep Mrs Deeming out of the parliamentary party. Surely it is not only a solitary young lad who sees the emperor has no clothes.

The third lesson is that politics is usually motivated by the desire for power. In this case, it was quite simple: Daniel Andrews wanted to stay in power, and John Pesutto wanted to get in power. The result was hardly the clash of the Titans, but the manoeuvring of play actors. One senior Liberal MP bleated: ‘We just want to win the election’. True enough. Pesutto himself has called for all Victorian Liberals to rally around the flag: ‘Let’s maintain our focus and attention.’ All this means is that he wants to be Premier for some reason. That reason is certainly not that he would be a vast improvement on either Dan Andrews or his successor, Jacinta Allan.

Most disturbing is the fourth lesson, that this is not simply a passing problem for Victorian Liberals. Pesutto is simply the latest in a conga line of hollow men — from Rupert Hamer, Jeff Kennett, Ted Baillieu, Matthew Guy, Michael O’Brien, to the present dear leader. To which we can add a man like the present premier of Queensland who has forbidden any discussion on abortion in the Queensland parliament for the next four years. In modern political parlance, ‘moderate’ is code for ‘spineless’.

In Australia — and in the Western world in general — political life is part of the sorry downturn in all of life. The ALP lost its connections with the solid working class many decades ago. Liberal and Labor now take turns at pretending that they are much different from each other. To mangle Juvenal only slightly, it is bread and Mardi Gras that win the day.

As he battled to abolish the slave trade, William Wilberforce complained about the British House of Commons: ‘it is not in fact talents in which we are chiefly wanting, but resolute integrity.’ To achieve resolute integrity, we need to know two things: what it means and how to attain a measure of it. Since the Christian faith is being pushed out of the public square, we are lost on both counts.

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Republished with thanks to AP. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.