Opinion
The ABC costs Australians north of a billion dollars a year. Long-suffering taxpayers are entitled to wonder how much less they’d be paying, if the Ultimo Collective didn’t keep defaming people.
On the other hand, centre-right figures seem to be finally learning from one of the left’s most potent weapons over the last few decades: lawfare.
UK women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen has issued defamation concerns notices against both the ABC and Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto, as she prepares to lodge a case in the Federal Court, which could run concurrently with expelled Liberal Moira Deeming’s.
Mrs Deeming is suing Mr Pesutto for allegedly defaming her after she attended a “Let Women Speak” rally last March, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
And the violent, far-left, of course — but that’s something the media-political class has apparently come to regard as normal and acceptable.
And, when they say “gatecrashed”, what they really mean is that Victoria Police mysteriously opened a cordon and ushered the neo-Nazis, with mutual high-fives, on to the steps of Parliament House. It’s almost like the whole thing was planned just to embarrass the women’s groups. But I’m sure that’s just a conspiracy theory.
Naturally, the socialist Andrews government and the media were on like flies on a fresh turd, but then the gutless, dripping wet “conservative”, Pesutto just had to chase after them, bellowing, “Me too!” Pesutto smeared his own MP, Deeming, as a “Nazi” and drummed her out of the party.
Deeming is having the last laugh, though: she’s become a hugely popular independent MP, packing out town halls along with other conservative “mavericks”, as well as suing Pesutto.
The lawsuits are hitting him thick and fast.
Fellow gender-critical feminist and protest organiser Angie Jones has also lodged a concerns notice against Mr Pesutto, using the same legal team as Ms Keen, namely Brisbane-based Alexander Rashidi Lawyers, barrister Bridie Nolan, and lawyer, former Liberal candidate and outspoken critic of recent changes to transgender laws, Katherine Deves.
Kellie-Jay Keen is apparently out to hoist the left on their own “free speech has consequences” petard.
Ms Keen’s concerns notices follow a notice she issued in late August, against Mr Pesutto and the other three members of his Liberal leadership team, accusing them of making “grossly misconceived, wilfully vexatious, and wretchedly false” claims, which she argued had seen her become the target of “extreme hate, abuse, harassment, and stalking”, and culminated in her “being physically attacked” and “placed in life threatening danger” at a Let Women Speak rally in New Zealand.
In her new notice against the ABC, she accuses the public broadcaster of defaming her in a 7.30 interview, which was conducted by host Sarah Ferguson with Mr Pesutto on March 27 — just over a week after the Melbourne “Let Women Speak” rally, and the evening after Ms Deeming had been suspended from the Liberal partyroom.
The notice accuses 7.30 of making 11 defamatory imputations against Ms Keen, implying that she either is a neo-Nazi or sympathises with people who are.
As you can imagine, the ABC went wall-to-wall with its standard attack of smearing anyone it doesn’t like as “far right”.
In her introduction to the interview, Ms Ferguson described Ms Keen as “controversial UK figure, Kellie-Jay Keen, an anti-trans activist associated with the far-right”, and went on to portray her in questions to Mr Pesutto as “someone with very clear … far-right associations, many of which you detailed in the dossier that you presented to your own partyroom” and “a woman with Neo-Nazi and far right associations.”
Naturally, Pesutto couldn’t help jumping on the bandwagon — and, indeed, going further even than the ABC. Pesutto’s gullibility and parroting any and all scurrilous leftist slander is coming back to haunt him.
Ahead of the partyroom meeting at which Ms Deeming was suspended, Mr Pesutto had circulated a 15-page dossier of social media screenshots and media reports – mostly relating to Ms Keen – accusing the MP of “organising, promoting and participating in a rally with speakers and other organisers who have been publicly associated with far right-wing extremist groups including neo-Nazi activists” […]
Asked who the Nazis were, Mr Pesutto said: “Okay so, Jean-Francois Gariepy, she’s done videos with Richard Spencer, Mark Collett, Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. There is a long rap sheet.”
Which was not true, of course. But Pesutto just couldn’t help himself.
Later in the interview, Mitchell asked Mr Pesutto whether he was saying Ms Keen was a “sympathiser of Nazis”, to which the Liberal leader responded: “Yes.”
Ms Jones is also suing Mr Pesutto.
The Australian
The lawyers have their hands full with tranny lawfare, right now. The same legal team are currently also defending broadcaster Sall Grover against yet another bloke in a dress demanding to barge into a women’s space. When Grover set up her “Giggle for Girls” female-only social media platform, cock-in-a-frock “Roxanne Tickle” got his borrowed ladies knickers all in a twist.
There’s no length these creepy fetishists won’t go to, to slither into women-only spaces.