Moira Deeming is no longer a Liberal candidate. The Victorian party's state executive took just 13 minutes on Friday night to unanimously dump her from the top of its Western Metropolitan ticket for the 28 November election. The motion needed 75% support. It got 100%.
She keeps her upper house seat until the election and stays a Liberal Party member, but she'll go to November without the party's endorsement. What cost her the ticket was the one thing colleagues kept asking her to do and she wouldn't: apologise to former leader Matthew Guy.
Thirteen minutes, and unanimous: the party couldn't move fast enough
The Australian reported the vote took 13 minutes and passed unanimously, well clear of the 75% threshold disendorsement required. The party's statement was pointedly short.
"The Liberal Party wishes to thank Moira for her service to the Liberal Party," a spokesman said. "The Liberal Party considers the matter resolved and we look forward to continuing to outline our plan to provide the fresh start Victoria needs, in the lead up to the November election."
A thank you and a goodbye, in two sentences. For a party that spent the first fortnight of July tied up in court with one of its own MPs, the speed of Friday's vote was its own message.
The apology Jess Wilson and Matthew Guy wanted, and never got
The trigger was never in doubt. Opposition Leader Jess Wilson cancelled a scheduled meeting with Deeming after the MP refused to apologise to Guy, and the party's legal affairs spokesman James Newbury spelled out why.
"Jess Wilson and Matthew Guy asked for an unqualified apology. Moira Deeming released a statement saying that she was not willing to apologise. Therefore, there will not be a meeting between Jess Wilson and Moira Deeming," Newbury said.
She didn't move, and on Friday the executive did.
The injunction she dropped first, and the headlock she had to look up
Deeming had already used the courts to buy time. She filed a Supreme Court injunction against state president Brian Loughnane to freeze an earlier disendorsement attempt, then withdrew it on Wednesday after handing the executive a statement and a mediation proposal. Her own explanation for what the injunction achieved became the line of the week.
"Having been overseas and unwell when the story broke and jet-lagged and unwell when the disendorsement meeting was called, the injunction gave me time to recover, review all the facts, learn the difference between a headlock and a collar-tie grip, and gather my thoughts," she said.
The complaint at the centre of it accused Guy of putting her in a headlock at a Sunshine West function on 23 May. Victoria Police reviewed the footage and found no offence was detected. Guy denies any wrongdoing. Through her lawyer, Deeming later said she'd misunderstood the term headlock and had acted in good faith to describe what happened.
What Moira Deeming keeps, and what she loses
Deeming isn't out of parliament. She holds her Western Metropolitan seat until the November election and remains a Liberal Party member. What's gone is the ticket, and with it the safe path back after the poll. She had also warned the executive she was facing bankruptcy over more than $1.55 million tied up in the party's loan to Pesutto, a separate fight that has frozen the money she needs to repay the developer who bankrolled her defamation case.
There's no easy landing spot either. Pauline Hanson had already ruled out taking her to One Nation, telling Melbourne radio "you don't do that to your fellow colleagues", which leaves running as an independent in November as her only obvious way to hold the seat.
How a rising conservative star talked herself out of a safe seat
Deeming's whole first term has been a fight with her own side. She was suspended from the party room for nine months over her appearance at a 2023 Let Women Speak rally that was disrupted by neo-Nazis, a group she said she did not invite and was never accused of sympathising with. Then leader John Pesutto tried to expel her, and she went on to win a landmark defamation case against him in 2024 after he wrongly linked her to neo-Nazis.
"This judgment is a public acknowledgment that there was never any justification, legal, moral or political, for what the Opposition Leader did to me and to my family," Deeming said after that ruling.
She won that fight. This one she lost, and she lost it over an apology she could have given for the price of a sentence.
The Liberals now go looking for a new Western Metropolitan candidate five months out from polling day, and One Nation keeps polling ahead of Labor in Victoria while they do it.
