Calls from senior Liberal Party members to drop Katherine Deves for a swath of transphobic comments have grown even louder, but the candidate for Warringah says she’s not going anywhere.
On Tuesday morning NSW Treasurer and prominent moderate Matt Kean unloaded on Deves in an interview with ABC’s RN Breakfast, saying she’s “not fit for office”.
This comes after a series of leaked emails from party members, reports about some MPs’ opposition to her candidacy, and high-profile government ministers’ refusals to endorse her candidacy have all heaped pressure on Scott Morrison’s captain’s pick.
Deves has dug her heels in. In an email on Monday to party members she said she intends to still run for the seat: “I’m not going anywhere.”
Some have raised the possibility that the Liberal Party is playing five-dimensional chess by using Deves’ repulsive comments as a vote winner. Yesterday Zali Steggall claimed that the prime minister is using Deves as a dead-cat strategy to draw attention from other more damaging topics. Others have even posited the idea that running an anti-trans candidate is a ploy that concedes the socially progressive Warringah electorate in order to shore up more votes in more conservative seats. These theories make no sense.
Deves has well and truly become a national negative story for the government. Crikey, news.com.au, Guardian Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald and other publications have published different yet equally shocking transphobic comments made by Deves over the past two years. Google searches for Deves’ name outstripped Morrison and Anthony Albanese at points during the past week. With 6000 archived posts made over the past two years, there’s reason to expect that further extreme comments will come to light as she suffers political death by a thousand tweets. The drip, drip, drip of negative stories will keep coming.
Australians overwhelmingly support trans people having the same rights and protections as others. While trans women in sport may be a more divisive topic, Deves is now associated with denigrating a marginalised group as sex offenders, labelling them mutilated and comparing them with the Stolen Generations.
These views are not broadly popular anywhere. No politician facing reelection has run to support her except Morrison. Liberal Party candidates in nearby seats have either run from her (Trent Zimmerman) or refused to be drawn (Dave Sharma). If there was really an attempt to try to use anti-trans sentiment for more conservative seats, surely the party would have chosen a candidate to run in those seats rather than in Warringah, which voted 75% yes in the same-sex marriage postal survey.
The question remains: why was Deves selected? She does not have a long history in the party. At the end of 2020, she said she’d voted for every party and was “politically homeless”. In March the NSW Liberals’ executive committee gave her an exemption from rules requiring candidates to have been party members for at least six months.
Her CV doesn’t necessarily set her apart from other candidates either. According to The Australian, Deves is a recently admitted lawyer who says she used to work as a “marketing executive”, but there are scant details on that. She is a working mother of young children, certainly a demographic that could use more representation within the Liberal Party and the Parliament.
A LinkedIn post from a University of Sydney page congratulating both Deves and Steggall — two graduates of their diploma in law program — for their candidacy shows the pair has not dissimilar backgrounds and even look a little alike. Ultimately, Deves was picked after moderate frontrunner Jane Buncle dropped out and was chosen over conservative-backed candidate Lincoln Parker. (Bet they wish Gladys Berejiklian had changed her mind now, huh?)
Without a doubt, Deves biggest claim to fame before the past few weeks was cofounding Save Women’s Sport Australasia. Her Liberal Party candidate bio references this activism as being a “women’s advocate” — if there’s another aspect of her work in this area it’s certainly not public, nor has she advertised it.
These views on transgender people were known to the party. At least two senior Liberal Party members told Nine papers that the prime minister and the party apparatus knew about her views. Morrison chose to highlight her and her crusade against trans women in sport on the first day of the campaign.
When it comes down to it, it’s clear Deves’ advocacy played a central role in her being chosen to stand for their party’s formerly blue-ribbon seat. Her abhorrent views on transgender Australians are a feature, not a bug.
