A defiant John Pesutto says he won’t resign as Victoria’s opposition leader after a damning court judgment found he defamed ousted Liberal MP Moira Deeming and will need to pay her $300,000 in damages.
Federal court justice David O’Callaghan on Thursday found Pesutto defamed Deeming on five separate occasions after the Let Women Speak rally she helped organise on 18 March 2023, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
O’Callaghan found a media release, radio and TV interviews, press conference and a dossier Pesutto created to justify her expulsion from the party room conveyed that Deeming “knowingly associated” and “sympathises” with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
He also accused Pesutto of “bandying around words” and not taking “care with his language”, causing serious harm to Deeming’s reputation.
Hours after the judgment – and despite calls to resign from colleagues and Liberal figures like former prime minister Tony Abbott – Pesutto said he would stay in the top job.
“I’ve always been a fighter, and I’ve always been a fighter for the right reasons and the … Victorian people, and that is why I will continue in this role,” he told reporters.
He said he was “very disappointed” about the court’s decision, though he respected the outcome and noted the judge made no adverse findings about his credibility.
But Pesutto would not be drawn on how he would pay the $300,000 damages bill and possibly millions more in legal costs.
“I don’t want any Victorians to be worried about how I’ll pay my bills,” he said.
Pesutto said he was seeking legal advice as to whether he should apologise to Deeming and if he should appeal against the judgment.
He said it was up to the party room as to whether she could now rejoin the party.
“I’ve been on record previously saying I wouldn’t support that. But that’s not to say that matters cannot be put before the party room,” Pesutto said.
The comments came after Deeming said she expects to be brought back into the Liberal party room as a result of the judgment.
“I was unjustly expelled. It makes sense to me that would happen,” Deeming said.
“I have every right to be there. I did nothing wrong.”
In his written reasons, O’Callaghan said Pesutto was driven to conduct a “media blitz” due more to a “fear of the political damage that would be inflicted upon his fledgling leadership” by the former premier Daniel Andrews “than by his professed concern that the party and the parliament would be brought into disrepute, as he claimed”.
While he did not come to the conclusion Pesutto was a dishonest witness, he said he was “infuriatingly unresponsive” during four days of cross examination and refused to “give a simple answer to simple enough questions”.
O’Callaghan described it as “shameful” that Pesutto claimed he knew “of no other person with such a bad reputation who has been allowed into the [Liberal] party” without a “skerrick of evidence to support it”.
He was also critical of Pesutto and his deputy leader, David Southwick, for not disclosing the existence of a secret recording the Caulfield MP made of a meeting with Deeming on 19 March 2023.
“It is an extraordinary state of affairs that both of them sat by, knowing of the existence of the recordings, and said nothing,” O’Callaghan wrote.
While Pesutto planned to expel Deeming from the party room in March 2023, she ended up being suspended as part of a compromise. Weeks later, however, she was expelled for allegedly “bringing discredit” on the parliamentary team by threatening legal action against Pesutto.
During the trial, Deeming’s barrister, Sue Chrysanthou SC, argued Pesutto’s push to expel the MP from the party had “nothing to do” with the rally but was because of her views on “sex-based rights”.
She said while Pesutto had never explicitly called Deeming a Nazi, an ordinary person would have inferred it based on his comments.
But Pesutto’s lawyer, Matthew Collins KC, rejected Chrysanthou’s theory and described it as a “conspiracy”.
Despite the leadership rumblings, the Coalition has overtaken Labor in the polls and is in an election-winning position for the first time in seven years.
