On December 27 in Spring Street Melbourne, while the state of Victoria was literally on fire, Victorian Liberals were hard at work re-instating Moira Deeming to the Victorian Parliamentary Liberal Party and changing their leader from former lawyer, John Pesutto, to former copper, Brad Battin.

At the centre of the change was the December 12 Federal Court judgement of Justice O’Callaghan in the defamation case of Deeming v Pesutto. John Pesutto was not only found to have publicly defamed Moira Deeming, but to have behaved in a shameful and dishonest manner toward Mrs Deeming around her expulsion from the Parliamentary Liberal Party in May 2023.

It all went wrong for the man who would be alternative Premier of Victoria, in an initial move of poor judgement, and then a seemingly relentless adoption by Pesutto of terrible advice by out-of-touch colleagues and backers.

This was not a solo performance by Mr Pesutto. He formed part of a choir of powerful players who aimed to reform the Liberals into a more progressive-looking operation.

Not insignificant to the sad tale of the political demise of John Pesutto is that in 2022 the Victorian Liberals convincingly lost what many thought was an unlosable election. They lost to political master and uber-progressive, Victorian Labor leader Daniel Andrews, the would-be evil genius of our narrative. Among other civil rights infractions, Andrews had presided over brutal and inhuman lockdowns during Covid.

Stepping into the frame at just the wrong or right time was Moira Deeming, the fresh-faced MP and party whip. Moira supported and attended a Women’s rights rally in Melbourne in March 2023. The Let Women Speak rally was crashed by an athletic-looking group of young neo-Nazis. Almost immediately, Daniel Andrews went on the attack.

Andrews appeared to have little desire to attack the neo-Nazis and instead focused on the women at the rally who opposed him and a range of his policies on the basis of women’s rights and the safeguarding of children.

In a May 2023 tweet, Liberal MP James Newbury perfectly expressed the feeling of the Liberal Party moderates, who had capitulated to pressure from Andrews by expelling Moira Deeming from the Parliamentary Liberal Party. Newbury said that a ‘line in the sand’ was being drawn and John Pesutto and his team were going to ‘clean house’ and ‘modernise the party’, with the aim of winning against Labor in 2026. In culture war parlance, Victorian Liberals were going to be just a little bit ‘Woke’ to try to gain more votes.

Counsel for Pesutto argued that the far-right associations of Deeming could be seen in her political connections with women’s rights activists who objected to trans ideology and paedophilia. The argument, when laid out, was called by Justice O’Callaghan ‘a very, very long bow’, and ultimately ‘dishonest’.

The extreme right elements of the party, that Pesutto and his moderates were cleaning out, never existed; the Labor media team had invented them.

Andrews’ success in deflecting criticism with attack had been legendary for many years and was openly supported by progressive sections of the Australian legacy media. Some went on to publish what was later judged to be slander about Moira Deeming, without challenge.

Unfortunately for Pesutto, Moira Deeming was a sacrifice to an emperor whose regime was already being stripped bare before the Victorian people. John Pesutto came forward with his part-progressive Liberal vision, just as the Andrews government was facing questions it couldn’t answer on a number of fronts. All the while, ‘Woke’ politics was going out of fashion like fluorescent socks in 1986.

‘Woke’ is an aesthetic concept, but is broadly the word used in the culture wars for progressive politics. The ‘Anti-Woke’ movement has been gaining traction for a number of years, and uses ‘Woke’ as a catchy and relatable word for cancel culture, left media bias, unfair equity and diversity policy, and the bypassing of government accountability to the people in favour of minority interests.

Pesutto’s advisers also missed the influence of the changing guard on X where a mix of right, left, and centre accounts were being freed to speak in early 2023, and many put their support behind Deeming, not just on women’s issues, but in defence of classic liberal values, values that are meant to underpin the Liberal Party of Australia.

The gender-critical women’s rights activists, (TERFs in culture war language) of which Moira Deeming has been associated, oppose the erasure of sex in legislation, but don’t fit perfectly in the anti-Woke aesthetic. Many of the prominent anti-Woke podcasters lean into anti-feminism in a competitive social media environment that monetises engagement. Picking on feminists is a big engagement crop for the farmers.

The bet that the Pesutto team appears to have made, that very nearly paid off, was that nobody was going to care about the sacrifice of a TERF. Pesutto and his advisers tried to cast Moira Deeming as a certain type of difficult woman obsessed with ‘women’s issues’: the Karen, the troublemaker, and the conservative scold who holds the party back.

As the evidence began to be presented in the trial, the claim of extreme right association by Pesutto’s counsel was mocked by their own evidence. Video after video that was presented to the court which depicted women’s rights activists mounting sensible, rational, and sometimes left-wing arguments for the rights of women and the safeguarding of children.

After the judgement on December 12, John Pesutto tried to return to work as Liberal leader in Victoria, seemingly unaware that the trial had been public and that everyone knew a Federal Court Judge had confirmed he used slander against women’s rights activist.

Pesutto and his team of supporters found they could almost control the party room, after winning a vote to keep Moira Deeming out on December 20, but they couldn’t post anything on X without getting ‘ratioed’ by their own side.

It became clear after the Deeming v Pesutto judgment, that it wasn’t just John Pesutto that people didn’t like, but Pesutto came to represent a type of appeasement to progressive politics that has been failing to give voters an alternative to authoritarian left-wing governments around the world, governments that are violating classic liberal boundaries of citizens with cultural policy.

In Canada, the failure to provide checks and balances to uber-progressive Trudeau has led to shocking civil rights infractions. On the other hand, in the US, we are facing the second Trump term. Trump is the anti-Woke made flesh. Many of us welcome the change in the US, but fell like we are on an amusement park ride with our fingers imprinted into the safety rail.

The classic liberal model that is being proposed by the Liberal right in Australia, under Peter Dutton, is coming across as a more traditional alternative to the sometimes hysterical rhetoric of both the Woke and the anti-Woke. This more traditional Liberal approach will probably see the Liberal Party win government in Victoria and federally.

In the court of public opinion, Moira Deeming gained sympathy because she appealed to the actual centre of Australian society, people who are going to work and being asked by their employer who they are having sex with by Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI) surveys. People who are being asked what their kid’s pronouns are on kindergarten sign-in sheets. People, who are women, who are losing their privacy and dignity in workplace bathroom facilities.

The ‘sex education’ that Moira Deeming was being criticised for opposing, the university cooked ‘progressive’ re-engineering of sexuality, is not just distributing misinformation about sex, it normalises prostitution to working class girls and is implemented without the consent of parents.

The class divide in the progressive narrative around sex is hard to see from Spring Street, but it’s obvious when you zoom out, just a little, from the glare of the St Kilda Pride Centre.

The Woke v anti-Woke is the culture war façade of what is a class war and a war on women. What we are seeing in the Pesutto tale is a glimmer of hope, but women’s rights still hang precariously, while they are a used as a political football by culture war Maradonas.