Moira Deeming might have received justice from the courts but not from the Liberals.

Last Thursday night, the party threw John Pesutto a $1.5 million lifeline so he could dodge bankruptcy and stay in Parliament.

Pesutto, the former Victorian Liberal leader, defamed Deeming as a Nazi associate and had her expelled from the party room.

Pesutto and a majority of his Liberal colleagues utterly humiliated her.

Who would want their kids growing up with that vile smear hanging over the family name amid the rubble of their mother’s political career?

With no choice but to seek redress for herself and her family through the courts, Deeming sued Pesutto for defamation and sensationally won.

Unable to pay the court costs ordered against him, the party’s administrative committee loaned Pesutto the money.

What’s intriguing is the loan, as described by Liberal President Philip Davis in an email sent to party members, was given on a ‘commercial loan basis’ that must be paid back with interest.

It begs the question why Pesutto could not have secured his own commercial loan without special treatment from the party.

On social media, Deeming described the bail-out as ‘institutional abuse’.

She is not wrong.

The saga began after Deeming participated in a rally in 2023 on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House in favour of girls’ and women’s rights.

The event was gate-crashed by neo-Nazis and LGBTIQA+ gender-fluid activists.

Instead of supporting the brave women’s rights advocates, Pesutto was apparently spooked and sided with the then Premier Daniel Andrews and the LGBTIQA+ activists who believe a woman can have a penis.

In his best Dan Andrews mini-me routine, Pesutto hit out at Deeming and other rally organisers Angie Jones and Possie Parker for consorting with Nazis, releasing a sloppy Wikipedia-sourced document to make his point.

After Jones and Parker also threatened to sue, Pesutto issued grovelling apologies to them but not to Deeming.

He wanted her drummed out of not just the party room, but the Liberal Party.

If a woman of the left of politics had been treated like this by a man of the right, all hell would have broken out in the media.

But it didn’t.

In case anyone hasn’t been paying attention, there are double standards.

A woman who fights to protect girls and women from biological males encroaching on their private spaces and from making their sport unfair has effectively been punished by the party to which she has shown unstinting loyalty.

Pesutto fought tenaciously and was happy to lose in court rather than admit that Deeming and the ‘let women speak’ rally organisers were right to resist this nonsense.

Instead of reprimanding Pesutto for being a fool, the Liberals rewarded him.

The Liberals’ founder Sir Robert Menzies, who spent the later years of his life voting for the DLP because he thought the party had lost the plot, would probably not believe that they could even stoop this low.

Family First has always backed Moria because her fight for justice for girls, women – and then for her family – has been a fight on behalf of all mainstream Australians.

The Liberals have no business lining up with the Greens, Labor and Teals on radical LGBTIQA+ politics.

If the Liberal party had a moral compass, it would have made Pesutto face the full consequences of his woolly thinking on the definition of a woman and of his pernicious bullying and defamation of Deeming.

Instead, they rewarded Pesutto and sent a chilling message to anyone who dares challenge their Woke view of the world.

Lyle Shelton is National Director of the Family First Party.