Moira Deeming will remain on the crossbench after vote calling for her readmission to the Liberal party room ended up a draw, with MPs conceding the issue is far from resolved.
Liberal MPs gathered at parliament on Friday morning to debate a motion to reinstate Deeming to the parliamentary party, but it was defeated 14-14, with the opposition leader, John Pesutto, using his casting vote to break the deadlock.
The motion was put forward by Chris Crewther, Renee Heath, Joe McCracken, Richard Riordan and Bill Tilley, who had argued she had been unfairly expelled in 2023.
Deeming had been expelled from the party room in 2023 after she attended a rally that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
A federal court judge last week found Pesutto defamed Deeming by falsely implying in comments made after the rally that she knowingly associated and sympathised with neo-Nazis, and ordered he pay her $300,000 in damages.
Pesutto said the hour-long meeting was “long and civil”, but that the matter was now resolved.
“This concludes the matter of the membership [of Deeming],” he said after the meeting.
“As opposition leader and as alternative premier, our focus is on holding the Allan Labor government to account, and that includes its new ministry, and also focusing on the byelections we have in Prahran and Werribee which will be held in only a few weeks time.”
He also said he would not be appealing the defamation judgment after consultation with his lawyers.
Pesutto denied that he needed to use his vote to break the deadlock.
“I had proposed and did use that casting vote to vote the motion down, but as it turned out, the constitutional requirement applies in any event that an absolute majority of 16 is required, so it overrides everything else,” Pesutto said.
“This marks a bookend to this issue.”
However, several MPs who voted in support of the motion have described the issue as anything but resolved.
Riordan said he was “flabbergasted” by the result.
“We are in a worse position than we were to start with in the sense it’s not resolved, our party room is split down the middle,” he said.
Upper house MP Anne-Marie Hermans said the party was “internally bleeding” over the saga, which has dragged on since March 2023.
“I personally don’t think that we have resolved it by having such a close vote, and having a leader having to cast his vote,” she told reporters.
“Internally, within our own party, there are going to be a lot of consequences.”
Crewther, a signatory of the motion, said it was “very disappointing”.
“The wrong decision was made today. Yes, it may be difficult to unite,” he said.
“But the debate was held very congenially within the party room. It was done in a very proper matter, and I think that we did show today that we can actually debate and agree to disagree.”
He said he hoped Pesutto and the leadership team will “reconsider readmitting Moira off their own back, given the very close result today”. But Pesutto said he would not consider that.
