Victoria's Liberal Party has five months to convince voters it can run the state. This morning it will be in the Supreme Court, sued by one of its own MPs. By tonight, its state executive will have decided whether to sack her as a candidate for the 28 November election.
Moira Deeming has lodged legal action against state president Brian Loughnane, who took charge of the Victorian branch in May, in a bid to stop the party disendorsing her from the upper house ticket she won at preselection. The case is listed for an urgent hearing at 9:30 this morning before Justice Kerri Judd, Victoria's former Director of Public Prosecutions, where Deeming is expected to seek an injunction stopping the meeting of the roughly 20-member state executive set for 6:30 tonight. The timing tells the story. If the court does not stop tonight's meeting, tonight's meeting decides everything, and Liberals across the factions widely expect it to end her candidacy.
Video: Sky News. News Night covers tonight's Liberal vote on Moira Deeming's future, the gala dinner CCTV, and the Redbridge poll putting One Nation ahead in Victoria.
For voters in Melbourne's west, today settles who actually carries the Liberal banner in Western Metropolitan in November. For everyone else, it is a party that should be prosecuting Labor over $244 billion in projected debt spending the final stretch of the term prosecuting itself, while polling puts One Nation ahead of Labor in Victoria.
The headlock complaint against Matthew Guy that police threw out
The trigger for tonight's meeting is Deeming's police complaint against former Liberal leader Matthew Guy. She alleged he assaulted her by grabbing her "violently" in a headlock at a Macedonian community gala dinner in Sunshine West on 23 May. Victoria Police investigated and closed the matter, finding "there was no offence detected".
Guy flatly denies the allegation. "There was no ambiguity. I did not do what was alleged. The CCTV proves this," he said. And his demand for apologies now runs well past Deeming. "Moira Deeming owes me a public apology, I'm owed an apology from the Premier (Jacinta Allan) and the Attorney General (Sonya Kilkenny)," he told reporters outside Parliament.
Deeming's lawyer Tim Houweling says the complaint was made "honestly, in good faith and only as a matter of last resort", and that his client "accepts she misunderstood the technical meaning of the term 'headlock'" but "will not apologise for something she had not done". He said she categorically rejects any suggestion her complaint was falsely made and considers any such claim "highly defamatory". That is a loaded word from this particular MP, and The Australian reports today's injunction bid comes ahead of defamation action she is expected to launch.
Pauline Hanson: "No, I do not want her"
When the Liberals first rolled Deeming from the top of their Western Metropolitan ticket in March, One Nation left a door open. The party's Victorian division had made a persistent offer for her to defect, and conservative commentators urged her to take it. Former Liberal figures have been walking through that door all year, with Colleen Harkin quitting the party for One Nation in June and Andrew Hastie's future the subject of weekly speculation.
That door is now shut. Asked on 3AW by Shane McInnes whether Deeming would be welcome at One Nation, Pauline Hanson answered in six words: "No, I do not want her". Her reasoning was all about how Deeming treated a colleague. "Based on her allegations against a Liberal Party colleague of hers, where no charges were laid, she refused to make an apology, and you don't do that to your fellow colleagues," Hanson said. "I want a person with integrity and honesty, and I don't see that, and that's why I would not offer her a position with One Nation."
The message in that is worth pausing on. A party polling ahead of Labor in Victoria can afford to be choosy, and Hanson has drawn the line at how Deeming treated a colleague. The standing invitation survived an expulsion, a defamation war and a lost preselection. It did not survive the Guy complaint.
Peta Credlin and Tony Abbott wrote her references in March. That support is gone
There is a family twist in who Deeming chose to sue. Loughnane, the party's long-serving former federal director, is married to Sky News host and former Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin, until recently one of Deeming's most powerful public backers. In March, Credlin and Tony Abbott both wrote references urging colleagues to preselect her. The Australian reports she has since lost the support of both Credlin and the former prime minister over the Guy allegations.
Jess Wilson asked her to apologise and got nowhere
Opposition Leader Jess Wilson cancelled a scheduled meeting with Deeming after the MP defied her request to apologise, then confirmed on Wednesday that the state executive would meet on her candidacy. On Thursday she laid it out plainly. "Matthew is a decent person, his reputation has been impacted by this report, I think he deserves an apology and I've made that clear to Moira," she said. "I made it clear to Moira that I expected her to apologise to Matthew. I think that is the right thing to do. Moira has decided that's not the case, and now the state executive will meet." On the outcome itself, she went quiet: "As a member of state executive, I cannot canvass what will be discussed at that meeting."
Wilson spent June moving a no confidence motion against Jacinta Allan's government. She starts July managing a Supreme Court action brought by one of her own MPs against her own state president. Oppositions win elections by keeping the story on the government. This story is nowhere near the government.
From John Pesutto's bankruptcy scare to a voided preselection: how it got here
Deeming has been at war with her own party for most of her first term. Expelled from the party room in 2023 over the Let Women Speak rally, she won her defamation case against then leader John Pesutto in December 2024, with $300,000 in damages and a $2.3 million costs order that pushed him to the edge of bankruptcy before the party bailed him out with a $1.55 million loan. That loan is now the subject of its own Supreme Court case, brought by five current and former state executive members against the party, with Deeming an independently represented defendant. This morning's application makes it the third piece of litigation between Deeming and her own party in three years.
In March she lost preselection for her seat, 39 votes to 26, to Dinesh Gourisetty. He resigned within a day, after it emerged he had provided a character reference in 2024 for a man later convicted of grooming and sexual assault of a child. Deeming went on to win the re-run after her remaining rivals withdrew.
Which is what makes tonight so unusual. The state executive is being asked to disendorse a candidate the party's own members preselected. Deeming wants a judge to look at that before the executive does.
What a win this morning buys her, and what a loss hands to Jacinta Allan
If Deeming wins an injunction, the party is stuck campaigning alongside a candidate its executive tried to remove, and the story rolls on into the campaign proper. If the party wins, it goes hunting for a new Western Metropolitan candidate five months from polling day, and Deeming serves out her term with every incentive to keep talking. And with defamation action reportedly already in preparation, tonight's vote ends the candidacy question, and starts the next case.
Either way, the winners are watching from outside the room. Jacinta Allan gets a week where nobody is asking her about debt or crime. And One Nation gets to make the simplest pitch in Victorian politics: while the Liberals sue each other over who belongs in their party, Hanson's party has already told voters exactly who it will and will not have.
