The thing with Moira Deeming and the Liberal Party is that there are people within the Party who are really, nastily, right wing in quite the same way that there are Republicans and Tories that verge on two ideological extremes and exist and subsist on the bones of the party.
This is regardless of the official positioning of the party as a Liberal, pro-business, economically driven party with moderate, utilitarian social mores. Sadly, the major new flesh of the party is in the extreme libertarians and hardcore conservatives, and the religious and gullible naïfs like Moira Deeming who are ripe for expoitation.
Extreme Libertarians do not accept the distinction between Left and Right wing authoritarians and so lump them both together as ideologically opposed to them, thus in their own minds, "Socialism" and "National Socialism" are distinctions without a difference. Thus they cannot believe that their party would have "right wing authoritarians", as that is an oxymoron in their ideological framework.
Right-wing authoritarians unfortunatelyexist within the Liberal Party and they attract and are attracted to people whose guilty inner worlds are innately attracted to concepts not very far away from those of the Nazis: ethnic superiority, the limiting of reproductive choice, and the desire for homogeneity, "law and order", and a capitalist economy that excludes all ethnic groups but their own. For them, they cannot admit that they are attracted to the same ideologies that drove the Nazis, so they buy into the Libertarian framework that denies Nazi values as a right wing construct.
Unfortunately, Moira Deeming, being a two-bit fraud of a member of Victoria's largely redundant Legislative Council, parachuted in to win the growing evangelical vote in the inner northwestern suburbs, is only bright enough to swallow and regurgitate the Libertarian-Conservative talking points, without having any capacity for critical self-examination. Which is the exact model for the kind of Liberal party that exists today because the party, losing its ideological drive towards economic rationalism and social utility as a goal sometime during the 2000s has been increasingly relying on the airheaded types who, bludgeoned by cult-like religions, are ripe for exploitation by businesses that want to escape regulation and racists and fascists who seek to aboid social disapprobriation.
John Pesutto may be an asshole who created a thin dossier out of random tweets that showed up in his feed about Moira Deeming with little understand of their broader context, but at least he's a regular asshole that we know and understand will be a little bit... out of touch. He reminds me of Denis Napthine, Robert Doyle, or Ted Baillieu.
Moira Deeming is suing because he made her look exactly as stupid, morally and intellectually bereft, and torpitudinous as she is, as is befitting of her station. Unfortunately for her, her failure to have even a rudimentary understanding of political theory, law, history or her own political movement and the fact that she was set up by party factional hacks as a voting bucket to take on the remains of the Bernie Finn vote from the dregs of the Christian Right, make her unable to see this.
Sadly for the state of Victoria, these kind of idiotic politics mean that our state has functioned without a meaningful parliamentary opposition for 10 years, and our Government has not been properly held to account on some fairly major economic and policy missteps. And sadly as well, the level of debate around serious issues like trans rights, access to reproductive health, and the economics of the north-western region get trampled in the dust of vanity court cases that only serve to pique the appetites of the grifters at the heart of the modern Liberal Right faction.
Oh and I see she has a Defend Deeming grift going on...
I can't say I'm surprised.
She'll get no apologies from me.