Many years before he tried, and failed, to save the Victorian Liberal Party from itself, John Pesutto was a first-time staffer in Canberra with a misspelled security pass.
The year was 1996. John Howard had just been anointed prime minister and Parliament House was buzzing. Politicians who had spent what felt like a lifetime in opposition saw a ministerial career finally within reach. And we were there, along for the ride: electorate officers travelling to Canberra on sitting weeks, feeding off the crumbs of excitement that fell to the bottom of the food chain. As true believers, we were happy to work long hours on crappy salaries and two-star travel allowances just for the buzz of walking through the hallowed halls. We were naive enough to feel ourselves on the cusp of something great.
Our lanyards told the world that this was where we belonged, which is why I offered my commiserations when I introduced myself to John at a function for newly elected parliamentarians. Someone had jumbled the consonants and come up with “Pessuto,” making an otherwise solid Italian surname unpronounceable. But its bearer was upbeat. “It happens all the time,” he said, rolling his eyes. He would get it sorted.
Having all received the “loose lips” speech from our bosses, we staffers tended to be cagey. Over lunch in the canteen, though, John was chatty and affable without being awestruck like the rest of us. He had indeed planned to come to Canberra — but as an MP. While I would have been happy to sweep floors just for thethrill of being around on sitting weeks, he had pictured himself lunching upstairs in the white-tableclothed members’ dining room, rather than down here at parliament’s monopoly purveyor of cafe-style food.
As sitting weeks came and went, I ended up getting the full story. After finishing a law degree at Melbourne University, he’d moved back to Traralgon, in Gippsland, and challenged the sitting federal member for preselection. He lost — as might have been expected. But the member for what was then the seat of McMillan, Russell Broadbent, was impressed enough to give him a job (keep your friends close, etc…). And here John was, lunching with a group of lowly staffers while his vaulting ambition and clear mental roadmap meant he was never truly one of us.
Machine men may do well in the ALP, but to be a hit with Liberal Party members in Melbourne’s inner-eastern heartland you need to bring life experience to the table — assuming your life experience is that of a business executive, a partner in a top-tier law firm or a researcher for a dark-money libertarian think-tank. Unlike us, John knew that every moment spent schlepping around Canberra for another politician was time he should have been using to schmooze branch presidents. In Melbourne suburbs awash with Liberal-held seats was where he needed to be.
For me, at least, those were heady days. I wrote my member’s maiden speech and listened to my words being read in parliament — an indescribable honour for someone who fancied himself as a Graham Freudenberg in the making. I would watch the theatre of parliamentary debate on the office monitor — not question time, which is when we would go to lunch, but the lonely, unrewarding speeches to an empty chamber or the tedious committee work delving deep into policy. The parts of the job that our bosses saw as peripheral at best were all I really cared about. I would chisel away at the words on a computer screen late into the night, reading them out loud in the empty toilet cubicle at the end of the green-carpeted corridor and trying to imagine what they would sound like in the House of Reps.
My days in Canberra would start at 5am at a low-budget hotel, followed by a taxi ride to Parliament House. The first engagement was somewhere around 6am, when a select group of Victorian Liberal parliamentarians and their staff would congregate in the offices of Petro Georgiou, a former party director who had gone on to become the member for Kooyong.
It was an intimidating experience. Georgiou would sit behind his desk, blowing cigarette smoke upwards and allowing it to descend on us like a thick London fog. Each of the staffers presented a summary of the top political stories covered by the papers, looking to the oracle of Kooyong for his take. His every utterance was absorbed breathlessly by the parliamentarians in the room. These muttered insights were the closest thing a newly elected backbencher would ever get to a political education.
Although Georgiou had only been in parliament for a couple of years, he had already been pushed to the outer. The unconfirmed story was that Howard had offered him a role as parliamentary secretary and Georgiou had told him to get fucked. Literally: he had told the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia to go fuck himself. The story may have been apocryphal, but it felt right in the telling.
I would watch Georgiou like a hawk, noticing every word, every roll of his eyes, every impatient snort, even as the inhaled nicotine knocked months off my life.
One morning I mixed up news stories involving two Aboriginal activists: brothers Mick and Patrick Dodson. When Georgiou asked me which one I was talking about, I panicked and said: “The one who wears a hat.” He thumped the newspapers on my desk, pointed at the pictures and shouted: “They’ve both got fucking hats!” These are, as they say, foundational memories.
As for John, he continued to meet up with other staffers at the cafeteria, where we would studiously avoid discussing anything overtly political — for good reason. First, we feared revealing something our bosses didn’t want ventilated in public, which could be anything and everything, according to the politicians’ ever-evolving insecurities. More importantly, though, there were the deepseated ideological differences that dated back to the Liberal Party’s creation in 1944.
Not every staffer at the table would have been aware of the party’s cultural history and only a handful would have been able to place their personal views on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum. Nonetheless, our conversations were usually permeated with the unease of people who didn’t know if they were breaking bread with ideological friends or foes.
This uncertainty meant we were often reduced to talking about TV shows — the latest episode of Seinfeld could help us fill the awkward silences and ensure we all got along. As is often the case with political types, my colleagues enjoyed a joke but none of them had what could be described as a sense of humour, which entails self-deprecation and a willingness to embrace the absurdity of the human condition.
Like the other creatures of the party, John wasn’t given to prolonged introspection. Yet he was certainly capable of it. And as was the case with many old-school liberals I came to know, he was determined to downplay his idealism lest the hard-nosed, pragmatic conservatives take it as a sign of weakness.
He managed all exchanges with confidence, exuding a maturity beyond his years. I now realise that he was a year younger than me, but at the time he felt older. If he’d had a rebellious youth, you’d never have known it; I couldn’t picture him wearing anything other than a suit and tie. Yet he could be warm and engaging. While cautious in what he said, he’d never duck a question. As someone who lived and breathed politics, he was happy to share his knowledge: the Victorian party’s key figures, the structure, the make-up of the executive, the preselection challenges.
As for me, it’s not that I was totally devoid of political ambition. But I was attracted to this world mainly because I had come to see politics as a great contest of ideas that could allow people to effect real change. I had spent my adolescence in Italy at the end of the “years of lead,” when terrorism from all sides had chiselled away at democratic institutions and freedom had been left hanging by a thread. Compared to that, life in Australia’s Parliament House was heaven; my peripheral participation in the rituals of a stable albeit dreary parliamentary democracy somehow felt reassuring. I had become a zealous proponent of boring normality.
The respectable mediocrity of the politicians I met, their suburban accountants’ worldview, was all part of the attraction. Behind the vanilla personalities and entrenched indifference to big-picture issues, they all appeared to have the potential to become a steady, sensible, mildly reactionary leader like John Howard turned out to be. They would work hard, keep out of trouble and enjoy an occasional research trip to safe, English-speaking countries, carefully timed to take in the cricket at Lord’s. Where the Italian politicians I had observed had been both erudite and unfailingly incompetent, the parliamentarians I met in Australia were the opposite: uninspiring and under-read, yet somehow capable of rising to most occasions.
That said, after just a few months in the job I could feel my enthusiasm waning. With every taxi ride to the airport, every commute to my MP’s electoral office in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, a part of me seemed to be dying. The more Pesutto got into the groove, the more I felt myself stuck in a rut.
You hear about the gruelling lifestyle and the toll it takes, but it’s hard to fully understand unless you’ve lived it. Every late-night meeting I attended, every branch function I signed up for, was time away from the normal life of a twenty-six-year-old. There were no moving pictures in the dark of a cinema, no memorable books to absorb in an outdoor cafe, no late nights with friends, no chance to find someone to fall in love with (other than fellow staffers — a recipe for disaster if ever there was one). It wasn’t just the boredom of the events that would drain you; it was the feeling of missing out on life.
More importantly, though, I sensed that I wouldn’t be able to navigate the ideological storm that was brewing. I was in Parliament House, watching from the office’s monitors, when Pauline Hanson gave her “swamped by Asians” speech. From that moment on, I sensed that there would be no going back. The mutterings of many MPs and senators I encountered suggested they were sympathetic to Hanson’s position and concerned about her speech resonating in their electorates; those within the party who objected to her sentiments didn’t seem to have the clout or the intellectual heft to counter them. The liberalism of Malcolm Fraser was being consigned to the history books; his last disciple, Petro Georgiou, had been left floundering at the party’s periphery.
I was already familiar with Hanson, who had been elected as the independent member for Oxley after being expelled from the Liberal Party. I would see her in the corridors and, unusually for an MP, she would have lunch in the canteen alongside her controversial staffer, John Pasquarelli, a bald, black-shirted former member of Papua New Guinea’s pre-independence assembly. She was also the only politician who showed up to the special briefings for new staff offered by the Parliamentary Library, which is where I got to see her up close.
The intriguing thing about Hanson was that there was no gap between her public and private persona. The library staff, many with PhDs in economics, wouldn’t be able to make it through their presentations because of her constant interruptions. It wasn’t just her encyclopaedic ignorance that stood out; it was her determination not to be condescended to by people she clearly considered out of touch with reality. She would question everything and roll her eyes when she got an answer she didn’t like or, more often, didn’t believe. “You would say that” was her frequent response.
Hanson had no chip on her shoulder about her lack of education — in fact, the opposite was true. She thought she was better than those who mocked her. Her “please explain” moment wasn’t underpinned by insecurity; she honestly thought that anyone using words like “xenophobic” was an idiot who would be held in contempt by the real Australia she claimed to represent.
We forget how shocking her first speech to parliament was at the time; how the targeting of a particular community had long been a taboo for politicians. It was a particularly significant moment for the Liberal Party because the response to those sentiments would go on to heighten the differences between the often-misunderstood founding factions of Menzies’s child.
Even without the spectre of a rising far right to grapple with, these were tough times. I spent three months working for an MP from Victoria, then returned to university to finish a degree before lasting another three months with an MP in country New South Wales. But the real turmoil came when I responded to the expectation that staffers would be their MPs’ eyes and ears among the membership and agreed to join a party branch in Melbourne. I had no idea what I was supposed to watch out for.
I remember one meeting of the party’s Kew Central branch, in Melbourne’s Liberal Party heartland, in which elderly party members spent hours debating a motion dealing with military hardware. I would close my eyes and visualise my life slipping away like sand through the proverbial hourglass. At home, my father would always bang on about how his had been una vita vissuta — a “lived life.” Would I be able to say the same at the end of it all? Would I look back from my death bed and see those Liberal Party branch meetings as moments in a life that had been worth living?
Luckily, there were also party functions that introduced me to a cross-section of inner-eastern party membership that I found easier to relate to than the people I met in my day job in the sprawling outer east. Back then it was still possible to encounter members whose outlook was tinged by pragmatic progressivism — well-heeled types, often the product of private schools. Their belief in social justice may have been more noblesse oblige than radical commitment, but when you find someone in the Liberal Party prepared to do the right thing you’re just thankful that they’re ready to show up and be counted.
It was in this period that I first met Kay Patterson, an inner-eastern Melbourne Liberal senator. If there was a political ideology associated with those suburbs, Patterson embodied it: progressive without being ideologically driven, interested in individual rights balanced against general notions of social justice. She wouldn’t have been as deeply into liberalism as my hero, the late senator Alan Missen, but the few interactions I had with her — including the crushing handshake designed to teach me that a firm grasp is everything in politics — left me impressed.
Unlike the NSW division, the Liberal Party of Victoria didn’t have ideologically defined factions. There may well have been wets and dries, moderates and conservatives, but they weren’t locked in preselection tussles like the factions in Sydney. It tended to be more an issue of geography: the further you ventured down the Eastern Freeway and onto what’s now the Monash Freeway, the more conservative party members seemed to become. Religion, which members in the inner-east would wear very lightly or not talk about at all, was a factor in outer-suburban politics. And because those seats were often marginal, the impact of these conservative party members appeared to be magnified. Liberal politicians were eager not to antagonise even the craziest constituents and party members.
To survive the week in the Deakin electorate office, I took to watching Sixty Minutes as part of my Sunday night ritual. I knew that when Nine’s flagship current affairs program featured dole-bludgers or victims of crime you could bet on the office receiving calls from irate constituents on Monday morning. Back in the inner east where I’d grown up, though, my Liberal-voting mother had never allowed us to watch anything other than what Peter Dutton described at the “hate media” — namely, the ABC.
We Australians are uncomfortable discussing class, which is why the ideological struggles within the Liberal Party are poorly articulated. In Melbourne’s east, the clash was broadly between Menzies’s Forgotten People — the established middle classes — and those we would come to know as Howard’s battlers, members of the socially conservative lower middle class who might have voted Labor a generation ago. It was all about class.
The weaponisation of the “doctors’ wives” moniker was linked to these social divisions. Out in the land of upward mobility and sprawling shopping malls, the expression was used by conservative party members to conjure up an image of do-gooder establishment types with too much time on their hands. Real people out in the suburbs dealing with cost-of-living challenges wouldn’t have the time or the inclination to dabble in lefty issues like Indigenous rights or refugees. If you had tried to tell the outer-suburban Tories that, in fact, the Federal Women’s Committee — the paradigmatic doctors’ wives — had played a central role in the creation of the Liberal Party, they wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. Their knowledge of the party’s history was close to zero.
When the independent teal candidate, Monique Ryan, won Kooyong in 2022, she took pleasure in riffing on what she saw as the sexist undertones of the Liberals’ references to “doctors’ wives.” She pointed out that, far from being a doctor’s wife, she was herself a paediatric neurologist — suggesting that the Liberals were stuck in a world in which women were married to male breadwinners.
Yet after my year in the 1990s dabbling in Liberal Party politics, I would argue that to see the “doctor’s wife” as merely the product of 1950s sexist archetypes was itself misogynistic. At the Liberal Party functions I attended there were indeed wealthy women with time on their hands, often with children who had just finished high school. They tended to be busy Beryl Beaurepaire types and were the backbone of progressive politics within the party. They would show up to branch meetings, do the numbers, speak to local politicians about issues of concern and helped rein in the more divisive policy ideas that many of the aloof male party members conjured up. Doctors’ wives in the inner east were overwhelmingly a force for good.
Whether it was a decision predicated on ideology or political pragmatism, Pesutto decided to throw his lot in with the inner-eastern suburbs and everything that entailed. He left Broadbent’s office, moved to Melbourne and started working as a lawyer for what was then DLA Phillips Fox, while doing whatever he could to boost his profile within the party. As for me, I had decided to return to journalism and was happy to let my party membership lapse, promising myself I would never return.
One day I caught up with John for a lunch somewhere on Glenferrie Road in Hawthorn, close to where he was now living, and we reflected on our time as staffers commuting to Canberra. By that time, dissatisfaction with Georgiou in Kooyong party branches was being discussed openly. Given the local expectations that such a celebrated seat would be occupied by party leaders and ministers of the crown, the unhappiness was more about his lack of career progress than his progressive politics. Under Howard, Georgiou wasn’t going anywhere.
Others would ask whether this was the right electorate for a party machine man, which is what Georgiou had been before entering parliament; and there were also those who said he just wasn’t the right person for Kooyong, which could mean just about anything.
That hostility towards the sitting member would have been tricky for Pesutto to manage as a prospective candidate looking around for preselection opportunities. Georgiou’s problem was that he wasn’t particularly presentable. These were party branches with treasured memories of the suntanned charisma of Andrew Peacock, whose Colt-of-Kooyong persona had little in common with Georgiou smoking in the corner and uttering “fuuuuck!” under his breath. And because he had been born in Greece he looked and sounded unlike anyone who had been in the seat before him.
Pesutto was himself what my father would have called “visibly Italian” — although I still don’t know whether that would have played against him. It would certainly have been a reminder that he was an outsider, in the sense that he had grown up in Gippsland in a very different social context. Going to the right schools in Australia is as much about staking a claim to social status as it is about gaining access to a network of former classmates who end up in strategically significant positions. John would have had to build a web of support from scratch.
I used to joke that if the concept of ethnic branch-stacking had been extended to Australians of Anglo-Celtic descent in the Liberal Party, it would have been front-page news. At functions I would be introduced to someone’s cousin, or brother-in-law, or step-aunt. There were branches full of members with respectable names and connections who didn’t show up for meetings but were out there — lurking, ready to be called upon when required. John didn’t have any of these networks.
It would have been some time in 2009 that he made his first high-profile move towards elected office. Georgiou had finally announced his retirement and party members in Kooyong were starting to position themselves for preselection. Ultimately, it was a polite contest among Josh Frydenberg, Institute of Public Affairs director John Roskam and Pesutto, who was leveraging his enormous work supporting local campaigns and just showing up.
I had taken a year’s paternity leave from my job at the ABC and had agreed to write a series of profiles of influential community members for the local Italian paper while grappling with two screaming toddlers at home. John was a good place to start.
DLA Phillips Fox, the firm later absorbed by DLA Piper, offered us a bland conference room for our chat and we eased in by swapping stories about how we used to get lost in Parliament House all that time ago. Once the recorder was on, though, the conversation became more cautious. John told me it would be improper to talk about either the preselection process or his rival Frydenberg — fine, I had expected that. But he also appeared baffled by what I assumed would have been the most basic of questions for a community publication: how did the child of a working-class migrant family from regional Victoria find himself throwing his hat into the ring for a seat that most people would associate with Robert Menzies or Andrew Peacock? Wouldn’t the Labor Party have been a more obvious choice?
“The irony is that the very things that can give you mobility in life are the very things that the Liberal Party espouses,” he said. “For example, the notion of the discipline required to lift yourself out of poverty… and my dad had known poverty, like a lot of Italians before they came out here… The only way you can get out of that is through the virtues that have influenced my thinking and my approach to life, which is ‘lift yourself up by discipline.’”
Looking back at my clippings, I realise that my interviews with other Italian-Australian Liberals, including NSW senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Queensland senator Santo Santoro, had highlighted similar ideas — often a broad notion that the act of migration is inherently an expression of individualism or a striving for upward mobility. In Fierravanti-Wells’s case, it was underpinned by the entrenched social conservatism of Roman Catholicism; for the others, it was a culture acquired by parents who largely grew up under Italian fascism. (That’s not to say they were politically fascist, just anti-left.) But John, who had always struck me as on the liberal side of the conservative–liberal spectrum, appeared inspired by the individualism at the heart of liberalism rather than by its social conservatism. And whatever values he had acquired at his Catholic high school in Gippsland didn’t feature prominently in his political outlook.
I asked John for a few family photos to use for the article. He went one better, producing an article from a local newspaper dated 27 September 1963 featuring a photo of his newly married parents standing in front of the house that his then twenty-seven-year-old father had recently built. “I love this article — the picture is really moving for me,” he said. “There they are, starting a new life. They couldn’t speak English. I just love it.”
Although his sisters had been solid influences on his thinking, John could pinpoint the moment he became interested in politics. “I remember I was around sixteen and I wrote an essay on the history of the ACTU,” he told me. “Suddenly, I found a source of interest, which was politics. So, it was in early Year 11 that I started to realise that I could see a higher purpose for me. Because before then I really hadn’t.” The way he recounted the story suggested that it was the calling of politics, rather than the lure of a political philosophy, that led him to where he was.
During the Kooyong preselection, Pesutto was seen as the candidate for the more socially progressive side of the Victorian party. To the extent that factions existed in the state, he was part of the grouping led by former premier Jeff Kennett, although he also appeared to have built bridges with the more conservative Kroger–Costello faction, which was supporting Frydenberg.
Part of his broader appeal as a potential candidate was the fact that his focus as a lawyer on industrial relations had ticked a few credibility boxes. Former treasurer Peter Costello had built a career around his legal work in the 1985 Dollar Sweets industrial dispute and had created something of a blueprint for those considering a life in centre-right politics.
Costello’s position within the Liberal Party had been strengthened in 2008 when he chaired the committee reviewing the party’s structures and culture in the wake of its defeat in the “Kevin 07” federal election. The committee ended up recommending a flattening of the party structures that effectively reduced the importance of branch-level politics. All party members, not just the branch delegates, would get a vote in preselection contests — something that made Pesutto’s attempt for preselection in Kooyong a chance to unleash some retail campaigning in addition to the usual schmoozing of party potentates.
My childhood home was not far from Kooyong’s southern border. Our house was nothing flashy — a three-bedroom investment property owned by my mother’s parents, who lived only a few blocks away in Malvern. Yet this was leafy Toorak, one of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs, which had voted Liberal since the party was founded in 1944 (and was destined to become part of Kooyong after the 2024 redistribution).
My mother’s people were of solid Scottish stock, their Presbyterianism having somehow given way to a less ostentatious form of Anglicanism that was taken seriously but never really talked about. Patriotism was of the understated kind and usually expressed by listening to the cricket on the radio and a strict adherence to not just the spirit but also the letter of the law. They had a zealous sense of honesty and respect for the state. If they found a wallet, they would move mountains to track down the owner and hand it back, with no reward requested or accepted; they viewed tax evaders with the disdain the rest of us would reserve for a mass murderer.
To the best of my knowledge, they had always voted conservative — it’s hard to imagine an upper-middle class, Anglican family doing anything else. My mother had inherited her politics from them, although she supported Gough Whitlam in 1972 and then again in 1973, before returning, chastened, to the Liberal fold. She and my father also had a brief dalliance with the Australian Democrats in 1977. (A campaign banner bolted to the roof of our family Fiat 132 caused me unspeakable embarrassment.) But that fad also passed — in fact, had it not been for multiple copies of Don Chipp’s The Third Man on our bookshelf, my parents would have denied it ever happened.
You could argue that my mother’s decision to marry an Italian immigrant was also the manifestation of a progressive streak; her classmates from the Geelong Church of England’s Girls Grammar School all embraced far more conventional trajectories. There she was — instinctively conservative and too disturbed by the strong Australian accents of Labor Party leaders to countenance a serious move to the left. Yet she was socially progressive and often moved by a strong sense of social justice, which only became more evident after years working as a primary-school teacher in working-class Richmond.
My father’s path to the Liberal Party was very different. He had arrived in Australia in 1960 driven not by poverty but by the need to break free of Italian society’s many strictures. He didn’t like being told what to do, and he wanted to run his own business — something that wouldn’t have been possible back home. He was no fan of communists, of which there was no shortage in postwar Italy, and also instinctively disliked labour unions. He defined his politics as classical liberal, although he drifted into conservatism as the years went by.
Dad was a product of the city where he was born and raised: Venice. Living there in the 1930s wasn’t like living through the Serenissima’s 1400s heyday, but it still had an outward-looking, free-market swagger. My grandfather, a Tuscan immigrant who had been a first world war fighter pilot, ended up running a water-taxi company on the Grand Canal; my father’s mother came from a family of shipbuilders.
My father saw Venice as laudably un-Italian in its flat government structure — a product, he would argue, of the fact that all social classes had an interest in commerce. As for social hierarchies, he used to say that when you’re transporting precious goods across the Adriatic and you spot a ship full of scimitar-wielding Saracens on the horizon, all inequalities fall away. Whether you’re the child of servants or the heir to a doge, you’re all fighting for your survival and the commercial success of your voyage. The culture of Venice, he would say, was liberista — based on a belief in free markets.
Whether any of this was true is debatable. In postwar Italy, the city of Venice was usually run by communist or post-communist mayors, even when the rest of the Veneto region was solidly centre-right. But this is how my father framed his own politics and why he voted for the Liberal Party as soon as he became a citizen. Unlike other immigrants, though, he was never a zealot for hard work. On Saturdays you could find him at the tennis courts of St Peter’s church, on Toorak Road — a pastime that may have been his only motivation in having us baptised Roman Catholic.
My father would have identified with the key message of Pesutto’s connection between Italian migration and the Liberal Party as an expression of individual striving. He saw his arrival in the country as emblematic of his drive and initiative; and even if he had experienced discrimination — how could he not have? — he never saw himself as a victim. Even when working as a waiter at the Atheneum Club (where he would regularly serve his future father-in-law), he always saw himself as a small-business person in pectore, in his heart of hearts, waiting for the right opportunity.
My parents were moderate Liberal voters, yet they would often come to the same conclusion via very different cultural traditions. I remember when, in 2001, the Howard government refused the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa permission to dock in Australia, mum and dad both bristled. My mother was horrified by the lack of compassion — something she saw as both immoral but also slightly tacky, as though the Liberal Party had become déclassé by embracing such nastiness.
My father, the believer in open borders, was horrified that a boatload of potential workers was being denied entry to a country that, he believed, still needed the shot in the arm that comes from immigration. “Let them work!” he would shout at the television. “Let them spend! Let them consume!”
During my brief career in Liberal Party politics I saw people landing on a moderate, pragmatic centre-right outlook for different reasons. And it wasn’t just establishment types — even back then, the inner east attracted both old and new money, along with upwardly mobile migrants with an eye on getting their kids to jump through the hoops of respectability: private schools, university at Melbourne or Monash, a job that was both respectable and respected. Somehow, they also tended to be socially progressive.
Meanwhile, as I write this, the political career of perhaps Victoria’s highest-profile socially progressive Liberal appears to be on life support. Not only was John Pesutto removed from the leadership of the state opposition, but a court has ordered him to pay $2.3 million in penalties and legal costs to the woman he defamed — conservative Liberal politician Moira Deeming. At the eleventh hour the party has agreed to lend him $1.55 million to avoid seeing him thrown out of parliament as a bankrupt.
I had always assumed that John would be able to fight back when the conservatives came for him. Now I’m starting to wonder where he finds the energy. Should he leave parliament tomorrow, he’d soon be earning enough to repay his debts without breaking a sweat. The problem for the party, though, is that Pesutto’s departure would tarnish its reputation and harm its electability even further.
So, how did it come to this? Other than making the mistake of defaming Deeming, what brought Pesutto down?
The problem is that he was always an outsider. Not belonging to any of the party’s three constituencies was both his strength and his undoing.
The first chunk of the party is the one tasked with finding jobs for the idiot sons of the establishment (and, only very occasionally, the idiot daughters). No surprises there: if you grew up in Toorak, you’d have friends or family members who have used their networks to spend a lifetime of failing upwards. I certainly do.
As for the outer east, that was the chunk of the party under the influence of the religious types: the people small-l liberals would refer to disparagingly as the “God botherers.” Just as Australians were turning their back on organised religion, the Liberal Party was busy producing candidates supported by branch-level zealots determined to impose their moral framework on mainstream Australia.
Then there was a third chunk: those who may have stood a chance but were often burdened by the kind of smarmy, humourless mediocrity I saw in so many of the elected officials I met over the years. For every Malcolm Turnbull you would meet fifty Scott Morrisons. And it wasn’t about elected officials’ lack of formal education — they all had university degrees. It was the lack of curiosity about the world around them, their reluctance to read or to get deeply involved in policy.
Every time I recall branch meetings full of pleasant, elderly blokes with a bee in their bonnet about Collins-class submarines it’s clear that this was a membership no longer fit for purpose. Every time I listen in to parliamentary debates, in particular Senate Estimates, I’m struck by how few of the party’s elected members have taken the time to understand the issue before cross-examining witnesses. They haven’t even glanced at the Wikipedia entry.
Of all the people I met in the party over the years, John was perhaps the only who stood a chance against these constituencies because he wasn’t weighed down by an allegiance to any one of them. The flip side of that coin was that his rise to public office was unnecessarily slow and marked by humiliations, suggesting the struggle that lay ahead.
After losing the Kooyong preselection to Josh Frydenberg in 2009, John had a stint at the Institute of Public Affairs before joining the office of the Victorian premier — the Liberals had made one of their increasing rare returns to the government benches — where he ended up as legal counsel to the leader, Denis Napthine. He then put his name forward in Deakin — the outer-suburban electorate where I had worked back in 1996. But he was beaten by Michael Sukkar, the since defenestrated conservative Catholic MP who had leveraged his connections to Christian groups in the electorate. Elected in 2013, Sukkar would go on to oppose marriage equality during the plebiscite and abstain from the vote in parliament.
Finally, ahead of the 2014 state election, Pesutto’s streak of rebuffs came to an end when he secured preselection for what was considered the safe seat of Hawthorn. The inner-eastern seat had become available when former Napthine’s successor, Ted Baillieu, left politics after struggling with party conservatives and his own limitations. Elected without any trouble, John took on the role of shadow attorney-general under the ill-fated leadership of Matthew Guy.
It was in the act of losing his seat at the 2018 election, when a Labor candidate took Hawthorn, that John Pesutto revealed himself as the leader capable of articulating the more inclusive vision the party needed. Speaking both live to air on the night and over the following days, he put forward a vision of all members of the community being able to look at the Liberal Party “as a source of leadership and inspiration and optimism… If we are inclusive, people will come back to us.” He was critical of the party’s lukewarm efforts to attract women and failure to embrace Australians from a wide range of cultural backgrounds.
Whether all of this was the cri de coeur of someone who thought his political career was over or a strategic move to position himself as a different kind of leader if he found his way back into parliament, is anyone’s guess. But again — when you find a Liberal prepared to say the right things, you don’t put their motivations under too strong a microscope.
Pesutto’s four years in the wilderness gave him a chance to tick off a few more credibility boxes for the Liberal Party establishment. He founded a consultancy firm, took on an honorary role at the University of Melbourne and made himself very available to the media — in particular, the ABC, which offered a direct line of communication to an inner-suburban electorate that wouldn’t be seen dead buying the Herald Sun.
By 2022, he was back in parliament, re-elected as the member for Hawthorn by a 10 per cent swing against the Labor MP who had snatched the seat from him four years earlier. But his election as the party’s leader later that year pointed to the depths of its ideological divisions. At the age of fifty-four, Pesutto defeated his rival Brad Battin, a former policeman representing the outer-eastern constituency of Berwick, by seventeen votes to sixteen. With the party so clearly divided, he couldn’t afford to make mistakes.
Non-Victorians unfamiliar with the Deeming affair may be surprised to know the extent to which it dominated Pesutto’s leadership, depriving him of a real chance to create the more inclusive political force he had envisaged back in 2018.
Here’s how it unfolded. In March 2023, Deeming, a Liberal member of Victoria’s upper house, attended a “Let Women Speak” event in front of parliament — a rally featuring UK-based anti-trans-rights activist Kellie-Jane Keen. The event was gatecrashed by a group of men from the National Socialist Network, who perhaps unsurprisingly regaled the assembly with Nazi salutes.
Pesutto was quick to declare that Deeming’s role in the event made her position in the party “untenable.” Yet the public messaging got scrambled: what could have been a solid argument that Liberal MPs should steer clear of the culture wars if they want to see the party elected ended up as a suggestion that Deeming herself had links with the neo-Nazi protesters.
The defamation lawsuit dragged on for what seemed like an eternity. And then, in December 2024, two years after Pesutto had defeated Battin, his leadership came crashing down. Deeming, who had been expelled from the party as a result of her decision to sue the leader, won the case in court, with a judge finding that Pesutto had defamed her on multiple occasions. The court awarded her $300,000, with the opposition leader also on the hook for her very significant legal expenses.
For reasons that remain unclear, both Pesutto and the party were adamant from the beginning of the legal action that the opposition leader would be personally liable for what he had said. It was a strange call: however ill-advised the comments may have been, he made them not in his personal capacity but as party leader.
By December 2024, Battin had ousted Pesutto in a snap vote that also readmitted Deeming to the party room. Relegated to the backbenches, he was left to cough up the cash on his own. As for the party, the conservatives were back in charge, doing what Dutton had done federally — alienating the party’s more progressive heartland in the inner-east.
Labor supporters in Victoria might rejoice in watching their opponents score one own goal after another. Yet the absence of a credible opposition can’t be good for anyone — particularly as the state faces a series of governance challenges, including the not insignificant issue of a criminal infiltration of government contracts. The demise of Pesutto, whose chances of returning to power appear slim, will affect both the party’s future and that of the state.
I lost contact with John several years ago, although he was warm and polite when he declined my offer to chat for this article. Yet his rise from political staffer to leader of Victoria’s opposition remains noteworthy. His vicissitudes are in some way emblematic of a party struggling to find its way, locked in a no-win struggle between an increasingly reactionary membership and an electorate looking for middle ground that’s tolerant, optimistic and perhaps even good humoured.
Of course, the question of whether the Liberal Party is a broad enough church to accommodate everyone is nothing new: the informal factions made up of small-l liberals, capital-c conservatives and everything in between have been grappling with this for years. But the 2025 federal election broadened the implications of the internal ideological clash. It’s no longer just a question of which tradition will have the numbers to impose itself on the party, but of which of the contested outlooks will ultimately be more palatable to the electorate. Dutton’s poor showing in Victoria points to the vulnerability of the party’s right, which can recruit party members and get its way internally only to find itself out of step with a centrist and moderate electorate.
Expecting Victorian voters to support a leader like Dutton was a big ask. Whether it’s the anti-ABC rhetoric, a thinly disguised disdain for environmental concerns, the nastiness directed at public servants, the blaming of immigrants for Australia’s housing crisis, the comments about welcome to country ceremonies in the wake of neo-Nazi heckling at Anzac Day ceremonies… there’s just too much of a cultural divide. The teal vote in previously blue-ribbon bastions like Kooyong and Goldstein can’t be dismissed; progressive Liberal Party voters are getting antsy and are ready to throw their weight around. The question is whether the party will be able to move past its conservative base and strike a more balanced political posture.
For people like me, that ship sailed when the Howard government kickstarted its plan to outflank Pauline Hanson from the right. Yet even as the country drifted towards this brand of muscular conservatism, I remembered many of the party members I had met in Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs with fondness. They were solid people. Reliable. Decent. And their marginalisation within the party had already begun.
In the lead-up to the federal elections I drove through the old neighbourhood. Our three-bedroom house with jasmine growing on the wooden fence was demolished long ago to make way for a McMansion; the Patras milk bar on Canterbury Road is now an apartment block; the shop on the corner where I got my first pair of school shoes now sells blinds and drapes. My father and mother are long gone, as are my loving, no-nonsense Scottish-Australian grandparents. With them, the Australia of the 1970s, the years of my childhood, has faded away, along with the defining political moments that my parents lived through.
Meanwhile, John, my former Parliament House lunch buddy, remains stuck in a losing battle to regain control of the party. He’s a long way from Traralgon, and even further from Catanzaro, the city Luigino Pesutto and Antonietta Mercurio left in the early 1960s to try their luck on the other side of the world. •
