Victorian Upper House MP Moira Deeming broke her silence on Sky News tonight after being unfairly smeared and suspended by Liberal Leader John Pesutto and her colleagues.
In a sit-down interview with Peta Credlin, the mother of four, including three girls, told why she is so passionate about protecting girls’ and women’s spaces from biological males appropriating their gender.
“I know what it’s like to be vulnerable,” Deeming said, referencing her own rape as disclosed in her speech to her party room colleagues just before they callously suspended her.
“Women and girls have no right to complain any more when their boundaries are invaded like that.”
She said she expected to be called a “bigot” and a “hater” for speaking at the Let Women Speak rally on the steps of the Victorian Parliament but not a Nazi.
The rally was gate crashed by neo-Nazis and Pesutto immediately teamed up with Labor Premier Dan Andrews to falsely smear Deeming as a Nazi sympathiser.
This was easier than saying no to radical LGBTIQA+ activists demanding biological males be allowed to invade girls’ and women’s sports and private spaces.
Credlin put it to Deeming that Pesutto had defamed her but she batted the question away with dignity saying if she had anything to say to him it would be to his face, not via the media.
The cancelling of Deeming by the supposedly conservative side of politics raises issues for conservatives about where to find a political home.
Deeming made it clear the Liberal Party was her party and that she “wasn’t going anywhere”.
She finished the interview exhorting people not to abandon the Liberal Party but to join it.
“I don’t want to start another party,” she said.
They are lucky to have her and clearly don’t deserve her.
All this matters for the Family First Party project because many of us have worked for years to try and get the Liberals, Nationals and Labor (two of our board members are former Labor ministers) to fight for faith, freedom, life and family.
My attempts over 18 months to re-join the Liberal National Party in Queensland were rejected despite high level referees.
Citing the LNP’s rejection of me, former Prime Minister John Howard wrote last year in his book, A Sense of Balance, that factionalism meant the Liberals were often more interested in “keeping people out than welcoming people in”.
“His values align closely with many Liberals,” Howard wrote of me.
“At ACL (Australian Christian Lobby where I worked for 10 years), he echoed the views of millions of Liberal supporters on social issues.”
While Moira has showed incredible courage, grit and grace in weathering a vicious storm brought upon her by her own leader and colleagues, she remains an outlier.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is vital that the Liberals have people like Moira, Senator Alex Antic from South Australia and Senator Matt Canavan from Queensland.
They all stand for the values that Family First seeks to prosecute but have all been marginalised by the Liberals.
Why Senator Canavan is not in Shadow Cabinet is probably because he’s unwilling to drink the climate catastrophist Kool aid and won’t shut up.
While ever the Liberals as a group unit fail to fight reckless net zero policies and the LGBTIQA+ indoctrination of children, there will be a need for Family First.
While ever Peter Dutton endorses the likes of Labor-lite Liberal Matt Kean and condemns the likes of sacked Christian Essendon CEO Andrew Thorburn for his Christian views on the sanctity of life, there will be a need for Family First.
Remember, it was the Liberals who rebuffed conservative statesman Kevin Andrews by dumping him at pre-selection for a “moderate”, the Nationals rebuffed former deputy Prime Minister John Anderson when he sought to re-enter the Parliament as a Senator and the Liberals expelled Christian candidate Renee Heath from the Party Room before she even got into Parliament.
The Liberals went to last year’s Victorian election on a unity ticket with Dan Andrews’ so-called conversion therapy law which jails parents for seeking to dissuade their child from having harmful gender reassignment surgery.
The Liberals also took a policy to the election to fund more activist lawyers at the Victorian Pride Centre, opening up massive vulnerabilities for freedom of speech and religion.
The Liberals leak to the media against Moira because she is pro-life.
I’m a huge fan of Senator Alex Antic and before I decided I’d hit my head against the brick wall of membership of the LNP enough times, I helped him recruit Christians to the South Australian Liberal Party.
But I disagree with what he wrote in an email to supporters this week where he said minor parties were irrelevant and there was “only team red and team blue”.
By all means promote a strategy of reforming the Liberal Party. I’m all for that and if people feel that is where they should best contribute, go for it.
But after 25 years of political activism it is clear to me that both Labor and Liberal are not at all interested in championing life, family, faith and freedom.
Yes, Deeming, Antic, Canavan and others are exceptions and more power to them. We need them.
But institutionally the major parties have given up sustaining a public and political debate about the benefits to the common good of heterosexual monogamous marriage, the human rights of unborn babies and their mothers and freedom of speech and religion.
They are often hostile to people who raise these issues because they would rather placate LGBTIQA+ activists and the powerful abortion and euthanasia lobbies. I know from personal experience.
They won’t touch the flawed anti-freedom regime of so-called human rights laws that have seen people like me dragged before courts for saying things like drag queens are dangerous role models for children.
There is a lack of will. There is a lack of courage. The major parties will not fight the demands of the radical left and libertarian right.
That’s why Deeming is a rare talent. I admire her courage. But she has been suspended and gagged by the Liberal Party.
I hope some people join the Liberal party and help her fight.
But making the values of faith, life, freedom and family mainstream again is not an either/or proposition. It is both/and.
It will take minor party pressure and it will take people from within the majors. It will probably take a long time.
Sorry Alex and Moira, we love you dearly and wish nothing but your success. We are on the same side.
But many of us have been left at the altar by team red and team blue. It is the major parties that have abandoned us and our mainstream values.
A political quad of Labor, Greens, Liberals and Teals run Australia. They all believe the same reckless extremism on climate and they are all signed up to anti-family, anti-freedom LGBTIQA+ ideology.
Team Family First is growing rapidly and we’re not going away.