John Pesutto advised Moira Deeming on Sunday night that her position in the Victorian Parliamentary Party was untenable after she attended the Let Women Speak event in Melbourne on Saturday organised by Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull.
Moira deeming was recently elected to the Victorian Upper House, and is a former local councillor and school teacher. In her maiden speech, Deeming presented a clear platform for women’s rights and talked about her broad association with more left-leaning woman in solidarity against gender identity ideology.
The women’s rights rally has since been skirmished by neo-Nazis who proceeded to do a Sieg Heil salute on the parliamentary steps where the women were speaking.
Speaking after the rally, Moira Deeming said she was frightened when she first saw the men dressed in black wearing masks because she assumed they were trans activist that were about to attack women. She was however confused that the police appeared calm and didn’t approach the men or initially attempt to remove them.
Deeming said until the men did the Sieg Heil salute there was no outward indication that the men were Nazis, even though they were clearly not associated with the women’s group.
It is interesting to note that Antifa were present to protest the women’s event but at no point objected to the neo-Nazis. The neo-Nazis were dressed in very basic black shorts and T-shirts and black masks and carried a sign that said ‘destroy paedo freaks’ (which is a sign the women’s campaigners would not have carried, obviously).
Many women at the rally, including Māori woman Michelle Uriarau, Co-Founder of women’s group Mana Wāhine Kòreo, said the salute was ‘chilling’. Moira Deeming is also a Māori woman and was reading out a letter from a Muslim migrant at the rally, she seems an unlikely person to be targeted as a white supremacist by her own party.
The Australian Jewish Association have made comments that the women’s event was ‘crashed’ by far-right extremists, accepting that the women’s event had no association with the unwelcome intruders. The Jewish Association also raised questions as to why the police were unable to keep the men out of the event appearing to have deliberately let them in.
Far-right website XYZ reported that the group of 20 men dressed in black were led by a well-known neo-Nazi. The report called Keen an ‘atheist radical feminist’. She is not a radical feminist, but right-wing men’s group are often too stupid to understand the difference between a grassroots women’s movement and more structured and academic-based radical feminism.
Women’s right’s campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull has been no stranger to controversy, cancellation, and police attention since she first commissioned a billboard with the dictionary definition of a woman; ‘Adult Human Female’ in the UK in 2018. The billboard was removed because it was offensive to the transgender community.
Keen and her organisation, Standing for Women, have since become famous for holding outdoor ‘speakers corner’ free speech events for women, that are regularly protested by trans activists. The events are often littered with Keen’s trademark merchandise, her rallies always start with her in brightly coloured outfits singing a short tune, and making bold and now controversial statements like ‘women don’t have penises’, ‘no man has a vagina’, women are ‘adult human females’, and ‘transitioning children is child abuse’.
Keen is a single-issue campaigner and takes a deliberate non-partisan stance, having previously been a supporter of the Labour Party in the UK. Trans activists and some radical feminists have made accusations the Keen is ‘far right adjacent’, in that her events are sometimes attended by far-right groups of men that are never invited to speak and are clearly separate from the, mostly left-leaning women.
Nonetheless Keen has come under criticism within the gender-critical community for not dealing with the right-wing groups with repeated ‘denouncement’. There is no indication that Keen has any far-right sympathies, but she knows enough about social media politics to see that these groups turn up to her events for their own purposes, and as a free speech absolutist she can’t stop them attending.
However, the event on Saturday was long planned and co-ordinated with the Victorian Police, event organisers made public warnings that far-right groups were expected and not welcome. The motivation of the far-right groups can only be speculated, but for my money they attend for their own social media optics, for the clashes with the trans activists, and for the flashpoints that feed the new social media political landscape. It is also extremely convenient for the Andrews government, which has taken gender identity policies to draconian levels, to associate all resistance with Nazis.
I met Keen last week when she was in Brisbane as part of her Australian Let Women Speak tour, she is a tiny, intelligent, and very savvy woman. Keen is friendly and personable, while being understandably guarded. While we chatted, I noticed her glancing at my phone that was sitting on my lap to check if it was recording. She is cautious without being paranoid, political without being partisan, and in possession of sharp operational instincts.
I am absolutely astounded at the stupidity of the Victorian Liberals. As if allowing a dictator like Daniel Andrews take over the state unopposed is not humiliating enough, they seem to be determined to lose at every point. Conservatives around the world who are adopting gender-critical feminist points are seeing some success against the onslaught of gender identity ideology in institutions. In the UK, women have at least maintained sex as a protected category in law, fought off self ID, and secured the right to speak about their issues in public, in their workplace, and in the media. This is more than Australian women currently enjoy.
It is only a matter of time that the self ID laws in Victoria will breed a scandal that we have seen in Scotland, that has seen the downfall of Sturgeon. Trans-identified male rapists are already in women’s prisons in Victoria but the media has so far managed to ignore it in exactly the way the police ignored the fascists entering the rally. This situation can’t be sustained, even with a virtual media blackout on these stories.
A woman wearing an Adult Human Female shirt was attacked in Melbourne by a trans-identified man last year, leaving her disabled. The attack appeared to be motivated by political prejudice and misogyny but doesn’t register as a hate crime in any Victorian law that protects only identity and not sex. The incident was only recently reported in an international feminist publication. Australian media are not fit for purpose.
The systemic corruption in Victoria currently hides the crimes against women of the Andrews government, but when these atrocities come to light, there will be no high ground for the Victorian Liberals to take after they have refused a publicly elected woman of colour the right to political assembly, free association and have smeared her as a Nazi.
Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt and blogs on substack
