Four months before Victorians voted at last year’s state election, a group of about 40 people gathered at a suburban racecourse and secured Moira Deeming a seat in parliament.
Despite Deeming’s history of courting controversy with her views on abortion (“a terrible evil”) and transgender rights, the gathering of party leaders, members and factional operatives determined she would occupy the unloseable spot at the top of the Liberals’ ticket for the western metropolitan region.
It is this process that Liberal party figures say needs to change amid a dwindling membership and factional infighting. To them, the drama surrounding Deeming – who was expelled from the parliamentary party room on Friday – is a symptom of much deeper problems plaguing the party.
Guardian Australia has spoken to nine state Liberal MPs and members who have called for sweeping changes to how the party is run, with leader John Pesutto saying “everything’s on the table” to make it electable come 2026.
“It’s going to be hard work. I mean, we can sit in the comfort of our own internal Liberal party room meetings … but they are not the pathway to victory,” he says.
“My colleagues and I see the challenge now, which is to turn the party outwards. There’s a place for debates about important issues – absolutely – but they can’t, they can’t override the primary mission, which is to reflect our community.”
‘The Melbourne people’
Voting in the preselection last July were the then state party president, Robert Clark, his vice-presidents as well as delegates from the state council and local branches.
Ironically, those who attended say Deeming’s success was in large part due to the support of Clark and his moderate faction. Members of the conservative faction connected to the powerbroker Michael Kroger opposed her preselection, but did not have the votes to stop it.
It is understood the then opposition leader, Matthew Guy, nominated MP James Newbury to vote in his place. Newbury has made it clear to several people in the party that he did not vote for Deeming.
One Liberal MP, requesting anonymity to speak openly about the process, argues low membership and organisation in some branches led them to have little influence over preselections.
“When you have big, healthy branches with lots of members, it’s irrelevant what the Melbourne people want, you can overpower them,” they say.
“The whole irony of this whole fiasco is that it was the Melbourne people who put Moira into parliament and they’re the ones who have now spent the first half of this year trying to get her out.”
Liberal sources say Clark and his allies later argued they had backed Deeming as they deemed the other candidates in the last round of voting as unsuitable.
West remains a ‘huge challenge’
Tony Barry, a former senior Liberal staffer now with political consultancy outfit RedBridge, believes the party’s problem begin with its membership, which has dwindled over decades.
“In Victoria the Liberal party’s membership is about 10,000 out of a state population of just over 6.6 million – that’s around 0.15% of the population. By contrast, the Melbourne Storm, an NRL club operating in AFL heartland, has around 40,000 Victorian members,” Barry says.
“In its halcyon days, the Victorian Liberal party had around 50,000 members (2%) out of a state population of approximately 2.5 million.”
At the same time, he says remaining members are increasingly motivated by “fringe issues”.
“Unfortunately, these aren’t the issues that most voters find personally relevant,” Barry says.
At the time of Deeming’s preselection, many within the party claimed it reflected the conservative streak of Liberal members in the western suburbs, pointing to her predecessor, Bernie Finn, who had been booted from the parliamentary Liberal party following a Facebook post in which he called for abortion to be banned.
A Liberal member in the west involved in the preselection rejects the characterisation. He says while the community is diverse, it shares concerns on issues such as cost-of-living and housing affordability which the party is failing to capitalise on.
“If we fight for that, I reckon we’ll get a lot more normal, younger people signing up,” they said.
Andrew Elsbury, who represented the Liberals in the western metropolitan region from 2010 to 2014, quit the party after Deeming’s preselection, saying he felt “no longer in tune” with the party membership in the area.
“Two decades ago, it would have been pushing over 1,000 [members in the west]. Now you’re looking at 400 max. You would be lucky to get 12 people to turn up to a branch meeting,” Elsbury says.
He says the party needed a “broad base” to prevent small groups and “single issue politicians” from being able to take over a branch.
Pesutto concedes the west – which has 11 lower house seats, none of which are held by the Liberals – remains a “huge challenge for the party”.
“You can’t make assumptions about the seats and the people who reside in the western suburbs. You’ve got to actually expend the effort and going out there and talking to them,” he says.
‘Then, of course, came the ultimatum’
Since entering parliament, Deeming caused headaches for the party’s moderate leadership team, who censured her in the wake of a maiden speech that called for an inquiry into transition practices and railed against Covid-19 restrictions, Safe Schools, sex work regulations and measures to include trans women in female-only change rooms and sports.
Tensions came to a head a month later after she spoke at an anti-trans rally that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
The leadership team immediately moved to expel her from the parliamentary party. However, they lacked wide support. Some MPs felt the punishment was too severe for a first-term MP. Instead, a compromise deal was reached to suspend Deeming for nine months.
Many hoped she’d keep her head down during the suspension period and return to the party. Others say they never expected her to do so.
“Then, of course, came the ultimatum,” one MP says.
Last week, Deeming threatened Pesutto with a legal challenge over the suspension.
She backed down from the threat last weekend, issuing a statement denying she planned to sue the party and claiming she only wanted a lawyer’s assistance to help clear her name.
That prompted five MPs to move a motion to expel her from the party room for “bringing discredit” on the parliamentary team. It passed 19 votes to 11 on Friday.
Her factional ally – Renee Heath – was also sanctioned in the meeting for separate reasons.
‘No other job has so few KPIs’
Barry warns more “fringe” politicians could end up representing the Liberal party if it doesn’t change the way it selects candidates.
One potential solution, he says, is abolishing local branches in favour of US-style primaries or community preselections – an idea that the former New South Wales premier Dominic Perrottet has also floated.
Elsbury says there is merit in abolishing the branch structure, though great effort would be required to boost engagement.
“Most of the people that are generally attracted to the Liberal cause are professionals, they’re working parents,” he says. “They don’t have the time, so they need to be looking at things like, ‘do we hold online meetings rather than in-person meetings? Do we have more short functions?’.”
One Liberal MP says work to rebuild the membership could take years.
The MP wants a complete shake-up of the party’s administrative committee at its next annual general meeting in August. Under the proposal, all sitting members will then be hauled before a new committee to explain why they deserve to remain in parliament.
“There is no other job that has so few KPIs,” the MP says.
Another MP points to the work done by the former British prime minister David Cameron to diversify the Conservative partyafter only 17 of its MPs were female and only two were from backgrounds other than European when he was elected leader in 2005.
Cameron created an “A-list” of about 150 diverse priority candidates, with at least two nominated at each preselection.
Pesutto says he has a “reform plan” to address the issues facing the party, including by bolstering membership, identifying “community leaders” who could make good Liberal candidates, setting up KPIs for MPs and working to improve the party’s organisational structure.
Then comes a focus on “mainstream” issues like housing affordability, the environment, criminal justice reform and addressing the skills shortages.
“If we do what I say, we will win,” Pesutto says.
