The Maori woman who has been suspended from Australia’s Liberal Party over her attendance at Posie Parker rally

A wahine Maori politician links Kellie-Jay Keen, or Posie Parker, and the Labor Party’s upset victory in an Australian by-election.

No, not Marama Davidson. We speak of Moira Deeming, who is mentioned in –

• An article which Posie Parker has written for The Spectator; and
• Media analyses of the Melbourne by-election result.

In her article, headed Fear and loathing in New Zealand, Parker tells of her experience when she and her supporters were assailed by a mob in Auckland.

The mob lunged towards me, screeching and grabbing, and I knew that if I fell I would never get up. I’ve stopped expecting mercy from anyone whose motto is ‘Be kind’ but the event last week was terrifying. I was sure in that moment, on the New Zealand leg of my ‘Let Women Speak’ tour, that the trans activists who surrounded me would trample me to death if they could. They gather in menacing groups to intimidate us and hurt us if they can, just to prevent us speaking a simple truth: that women don’t have penises, men don’t have vaginas, there is no such thing as non-binary and transitioning children is abuse.

Before coming to New Zealander, Parker says, she had started her talks at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London, and taken them around the UK and across the USA.

The format of the event is a gathering with a microphone and amplification, livestreamed to my ‘Kellie-Jay Keen’ YouTube channel. Women can finally say what they want, protected by the group. It’s a genuine free speech event. Sydney, Brisbane and Perth events saw a few hundred women in total attend and speak about the impact transgender ideology is having upon their lives. They were afraid and yet defiant – they’ve had enough. There were tears and a triumphant resolve to bring our society back to a place where the truth has more value than virtue-signalling.

The turn towards violence came in Melbourne, at Parker’s largest gathering.

The police had done a pretty fine job of protecting women with buffer zones between us and the rabid trans activists. But this gathering included competing groups of woman-hating losers: trans incels to the left of me and Nazis to the right, and here we were stuck in the middle and blamed by the media and politicians for the Nazi salute that occurred.

I’ve been asked following that incident whether I have sympathies with the far right, but seriously, who does? It’s a vile ideology and frankly anyone convinced by it in 2023 is pathetic. John Pesutto, the leader of the Liberals in Victoria, repeated dangerous lies about me and suspended Moira  Deeming MP from his party for her association with me.

 Some commentators have linked that suspension with the news which the Sydney Morning Herald headlined as –

Labor secures historic upset in Aston, ‘worst byelection result in 100 years’ for Liberals

Labor’s Mary Doyle has defeated the Liberals’ Roshena Campbell to snatch the federal seat of Aston in a historic upset win in the crucial byelection in Melbourne’s outer east.

It marks the first time in a century that a sitting government has won a seat from the opposition in a byelection. The last time was in 1920.

The by-election had been triggered by the resignation of former Liberal cabinet minister Alan Tudge.

Some Liberal Party figures were critical of Victorian division administrators.

Others blamed the week-long saga over Moira Deeming’s attempted expulsion from the state parliamentary team as a distraction after it was raised by Dutton in the federal party room.

 And:

 A senior Victorian Liberal figure, speaking on the condition of anonymity, gave a scathing assessment of the Victorian division and declared state opposition leader John Pesutto’s push to expel Deeming as a factor in the loss.

“We were talking about ourselves. It was handled poorly and they saw us as anti-Christian,” they said.

Party leader  Peter Dutton also said the Deeming saga was one of a number of factors that “fed into the result”.

Point of Order has previously posted on the attempt by Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto to expel Deeming from the state’s Parliamentary Liberal Party.  The attempt failed, but she has been suspended for nine months.

This punitive action was taken because Deeming, recently elected to represent Melbourne’s Western Metropolitan Region in Victoria’s Upper House, had spoken at the Let Women Speak event in Melbourne which featured Posie Parker.

Deeming’s Christian beliefs and her presence at the Posie Parker rally should have caused no surprise to Liberal Party leaders.

In her maiden speech in Victoria’s Legislative Council in February, she said:

I would like to start by thanking God for the honour of standing here today, and I would especially like to thank the people of the Western Metropolitan Region for trusting me to represent them in Parliament. It is also my honour to be the first Māori Australian member of the Victorian Parliament.

She explained she had been born and bred on the political left.

Her great-grandfather was John Joseph Holland, a trade union leader, a western suburbs Labor MP for over 30 years and a councillor for the City of Melbourne. His son Kevin, who was also a union leader and a Member of the Order of Australia, took over his seat as a Labor Party MP. Her father was a unionised teacher and her mother was a nurse who worked her way up to be a leader in the Australian nursing federation.

But …

As a teenager I witnessed firsthand the corruption and the brutal, coordinated bullying of anyone who does not think and act in unity with the left. There are many stories that I could tell, but one stands out. A woman that I loved and admired quietly refused to take part in the corrupt misuse of union funds. Enraged by this, the union leaders ruthlessly bullied her, blacklisted her from working in Victoria for over 20 years and destroyed her career. Even after these bullies were successfully sued for their behaviour, they kept their jobs and their fines were paid by the very same union whose money they had been siphoning off – for guess who? For years afterwards I would see them on TV being publicly praised as champions of the working class.

And:

Liberty’s reforged chains of oppression are the best illustration I can think of for the dangers of left-wing ideology. That is why I turned away from it. Because individual rights and liberties must never be sacrificed for coerced unity.

I believe that every individual is unique, endowed with human dignity and worthy of our care and respect. And those on every side of politics care in exactly the same way.

She was critical of those who are willing to sacrifice individual human rights in the pursuit of collective goals.

They argue that the end justifies the means, but as a Liberal, I believe that only by just means can we achieve a just outcome. That is why I believe in the freedom to worship, to think and …  the right to disagree… 

Politics had not been her original plan. She had chosen a career in teaching, was loving it and was honoured that parents would entrust their children to her

But I began to be very concerned about the things that I was being told to teach. Lessons on tolerance were being replaced with lessons on inclusion. It was not enough anymore to just accept each other’s differences with respect. Now students were required to affirm and celebrate beliefs that they just did not share. Perfectly reasonable moral and religious differences were being reframed as discriminatory and intolerant, and a new vocabulary was introduced categorising people as allies or enemies.

Instead of being inspired by history’s heroes, students were being chastised and even told to stand up in class and apologise for historical crimes that they had neither committed nor condoned.

The final straw, which compelled Deeming to challenge the government head on, was discovering that school policies and curriculums had been radically altered to remove almost every child-safeguarding standard. Primary school children were being subjected to erotic sexual content and:

Female students no longer had the right to single-sex sports teams, toilets or change rooms, and teachers like me were being forced to lie to parents about their children, who were secretly living as one gender at school and another gender at home.

 I realised then that my teaching career was over, because I simply would not ever do the things that I was being asked to do. I would never ask students to tell the class which sexual experiences they had had and which they were willing to do. I would never tell girls to bind their breasts. I would never accuse gay students of being transphobic. I would never tell my female students that they had to tolerate a male teacher supervising their change rooms, and I was never, ever going to lie to parents about what was going on with their own children at school. But I also knew that if I spoke out I was going to be vilified and that I would never work in a public school again, and that is exactly what happened – but so be it.

Deeming said she was going to focus on women and children.

First item among her priorities was sex-based rights. Women and girls were suffering in Victoria because the government could not or would not define what a female is, she contended.  As a result women and girls had lost the right to enjoy female-only sports, female-only change rooms and countless other female-only activities.

Surely there must be ways to ensure the safety and dignity of trans people which do not trample on the rights of women and girls. I call upon this government to immediately reinstate sex-based rights in the law.