Deeming, a mother of four, said the new awareness of gender fluidity and the implications of additional rights for trans people was her “number one issue”. She was elected to Melton City Council in 2020 on a platform that included advocating for separate bathrooms for trans people and claimed that the Safe Schools program aimed at preventing bullying of LGBTQ children was a “unnecessary nonsense”.
In December, the councilwoman said she couldn’t support any motions related to the mandates or the COVID-19 vaccines because she “didn’t agree with any of them.” “Mr Andrews, overturn these mandates,” he posted on social media.
Right wing Victorian MP Bernie Finn. Credits: Joe Armao
Deeming is friends with Finn, who was kicked off the Liberal Party’s parliamentary team in May for repeated inappropriate behaviour, particularly on social media. The behavior included portraying Prime Minister Daniel Andrews as a Nazi and arguing that abortion should be banned for rape victims.
Mr Finn told The Age it would be fair to describe Deeming, who he endorsed ahead of the pre-selection vote involving around 45 party members, as his protégé. He described her as intelligent and politically astute and said the vote showed people in Melbourne’s west wanted a social conservative MP.
“People on the other side of Melbourne don’t realize that social conservatism in the west is very strong, even among Labor voters,” he said, arguing it was a great opportunity to win a seat from upper house in the same metropolitan region of the west that is running as a candidate for the Democratic Labor Party in the November election. He currently sits on the cross bench of the upper chamber.
Finn said he aspired as a teenager to be an MP for the DLP, the anti-communist wing of the Labor Party that emerged from the 1950s split but had no MPs between 1976 and 2006. His last Victorian upper house MP he lost his position in the 2018 election. .
When the Liberals kicked Finn out of the parliamentary party, Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said the party accepted diverse views but expected “people to have a respectful discourse no matter what their issues are”.
Guy said Deeming had expressed his views “in quite a respectful way and he’s entitled to have a different point of view to a lot of people”.
The Age has been told that Guy did not try to block Deeming’s pre-selection once she was chosen by grassroots members. The devout Christian won more than twice as many votes as her nearest rival in Saturday’s vote.
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Outgoing state party chairman Robert Clark and his allies, who were elected to vote as party officials, backed her, even though they belong to a faction that includes the party’s most liberal members. The Clark faction has been the dominant group in the party for years, in part because of its association with a hardline religious group led by influential Christian activist Karina Okotel. Clark himself is a socially conservative Christian.
Members of the more mainstream Conservative faction, connected to federal MPs such as Michael Sukkar and powerbroker Michael Kroger, opposed his pre-selection but did not have enough votes to block it at an administrative committee meeting on Sunday.
Two party figures explained that Clark and his allies did not support Deeming because they agreed with his views. Rather, they insisted that the last two candidates facing her in the last ballot were unpalatable. They include Dinesh Gourisetty, who pleaded guilty in 2019 to food law violations and paid $25,000 for running a dirty restaurant, and Fred Ackerman, 69.
Another party agent added: “[Deeming] he doesn’t run for Hawthorn. Many people in the immigrant communities of the western suburbs would share some of his views. We are not prepared to say that there is no place for such views in the Liberal Party. She was the most eligible candidate and she presented herself well.”
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Deeming, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, said privately this week that she would not be an outspoken culture warrior and would focus on policy areas such as education.
The culture of the Liberal Party places more emphasis on the autonomy of local members to select members than the Labor Party, whose collectivist philosophy lends itself to central decision-making. While this ethos helps maintain the principles of party democracy, it also makes it difficult for the party leadership to stop branch members, who may be far to the right of mainstream Victorians, from electing candidates who align with their opinions
A party member with local knowledge of the western suburbs said members of the city and eastern suburbs underestimated Finn’s level of local support.
“Bernie is their man. They thought he was doing an excellent job and if they couldn’t get him back, they were going to get someone with the same line. Now they found someone who is an even stronger advocate for these issues,” he said. .
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