Pesutto leadership on the line as he faces special party room meeting

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Opposition Leader John Pesutto will have to front the Liberal party room on Friday after five MPs signed a motion calling for a meeting to return exiled MP Moira Deeming.

The move is a major test of Pesutto’s leadership after Liberal MP Sam Groth, floated as a potential challenger for the Liberal leadership, resigned from the opposition frontbench on Friday.

Under their own rules, the Victorian Liberal party room must hold a special meeting if a petition of MPs has gained five signatures. On Monday night, opposition MPs Richard Riordan, Bill Tilley, Renee Heath, Chris Crewther and Joe McCracken all revealed they had signed one of these petitions with the purpose of reinstating Moira Deeming to the party room.

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In a statement, the five said they had called for a vote that would give the parliamentary Liberal party the “chance to do the right thing, and put behind us any injustices that have occurred since March 2023”.

Pesutto was ordered on Thursday to pay $300,000 in damages and savaged over his time in the witness box in a 250-page judgment that found he injured Deeming’s reputation by repeatedly and falsely implying that she knowingly associated with neo-Nazis.

“It is a simple matter of fairness,” the statement read. “As Justice O’Callaghan’s judgment makes clear, the justification put to the party room for Moira Deeming MP’s expulsion was fundamentally
flawed.

“Liberal Party members, and indeed all Victorians, expect their elected Liberal members to
act with integrity, and to do right by our colleagues as we would by the state. A vote for this motion would show that we take these expectations seriously.

“As a team we look forward to closing this sorry chapter for good and moving on rapidly and
with decency and integrity.”

The move presents a major challenge to Pesutto’s leadership as he seeks to move on from the damaging defamation trial with Deeming.

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