Former Victoria Liberal leader to avoid bankruptcy after party provides loan

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Former Victorian Opposition leader John Pesutto has been thrown a financial and political lifeline. The Liberal party has agreed to loan him more than 1.5 million dollars to stave off bankruptcy.

Transcript

00:00This has been negotiated for weeks and weeks.

00:05John Pesuto was facing bankruptcy as early as next week.

00:09After the federal court, earlier this year, ordered he pay $2.3 million to his fellow

00:14Liberal MP, Moira Deeming, after she successfully sued him for defamation late last year.

00:20She's already paid her $315,000 in damages.

00:24He doesn't have $2.3 million.

00:26He's raised about a third of that, and he has gone to the party in an order to avoid

00:31a by-election and has secured a loan.

00:33Essentially, the party administration committee last night met, and that's essentially the

00:38board of directors of the Victorian branch, to discuss this loan.

00:41And what they've resolved was that they would pay $1.55 million to Moira Deeming directly,

00:47and John Pesuto would repay the party at a commercial rate for that debt.

00:52It avoids the by-election.

00:54Brad Batten, the opposition leader, supported this move after a long time of internal fighting,

01:01I guess.

01:01This is not just about John Pesuto and Moira Deeming.

01:04It's a sort of a lightning rod for internal division.

01:08Brad Batten said on the radio this morning on the ABC that this should draw a line in the

01:12sand.

01:12I supported a motion last night to go through this process now, so we're now in a position

01:19that we can eventually clear this out and start to move in the direction we want to

01:23go, which is talking more about Victorians and less about the Victorian Liberal Party.

01:26In the short term, this will quell some of the division and the anger because it does

01:31avoid a by-election in Hawthorne.

01:33But also the membership, a lot of the members, the grassroots members, are angry that their

01:39money is being used to bail out someone from a court defeat, from a thing that was emphatically

01:45found that John Pesuto had defamed Moira Deeming when he said she associated with neo-Nazis.

01:50Now, we know that's wrong.

01:52That's what the court has found.

01:53And there's sort of this anger that why should the party be helping him out?

01:57And the party is acting because they want to avoid that by-election.

02:00But there's quite a lot of anger and there's also a lot of people in the party who thought

02:04that Moira Deeming shouldn't have been silenced, that she was right to be talking about these

02:07issues at the Let Women Speak rally.

02:09And I just don't think right now there's MPs, there's party members today saying privately

02:14that this doesn't end anything.

02:16It doesn't resolve it.

02:17They've still got severe tensions and disagreements and this culture that is always about who's

02:23in control rather than, as Brad Batten said in his commentary there on radio this

02:27morning, focusing on being an opposition to take on the Victorian Labor Government.

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