When you’re in a hole the best advice is to stop digging. But not if you’re a former Liberal leader in Victoria. Instead, you bring in an excavator, as well as a couple of sticks of gelignite, for good measure. How else do you explain the madness that’s being suggested by John Pesutto, Jeff Kennett, Ted Baillieu and others that the Liberal Party pay the $2.3m in indemnity costs ordered by the Federal Court after Pesutto defamed fellow Liberal Moira Deeming?
In what other workplace would people in a position of authority get bailed out after a court found they had reputationally destroyed a colleague, concealed secret recordings from evidence and generally made someone’s life a living hell?
And yet the Liberal Party wonders why it has a problem with women if this is how one of their own is treated. But to merely equate this with rank misogyny misses the rich vein of snobbery that runs through this whole sorry saga. I mean how dare a former schoolteacher from struggle street in western Melbourne stand up to the lawyer-turned-party-leader from the leafy suburbs of Hawthorn? And in taking him on, how dare she win?
All through this case, the word around Melbourne Liberal circles was that this would be a laydown misere win for Pesutto. Anyone seen to be defending Deeming was to be ostracised and in not-so veiled threats from Kennett, he declared her supporters inside the parliamentary Liberal Party “disloyal and perhaps even treacherous” and threatened to have them “dealt with in due course when preselections are called for the next election”.
What is staggering is that Pesutto, a former solicitor and shadow attorney-general, refused to countenance losing this case and rejected a pre-trial offer to settle for $99,000 without even an apology. Indeed, part of the reason for the massive costs order against him is because he ignored opportunities to mitigate damage and deliberately prolonged proceedings, as repeatedly referenced by Justice O’Callaghan in his judgment.
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