The Victorian Liberal Party will, on Friday, meet to vote on a motion to expel MP Moira Deeming from the parliamentary party.

The motion has been signed by front bench MPs James Newbury, Cindy McLeish, and Roma Britnell, former leader Matthew Guy, and newly elected MP Wayne Farnham.

This comes after a week where another female conservative Victorian state Liberal MP, Renee Heath, raised allegations of bullying by Opposition Leader John Pesutto (which he denies).

Sometime-contributor to these pages, and another conservative woman, Bev Macarthur, also seems to be in the sights of Pesutto and his ‘moderate’ allies.

Meanwhile Guy, speaking on a podcast with 3AW radio show host Neil Mitchell, blamed, among others, ‘faceless leakers’ for his devastating loss in November last year. He added that ‘people on our side who talk us down, who talk our parliamentary party down, talk the brand down, talk us down at every opportunity’, along with Sky News after dark, whose programs were ‘akin to the politics of One Nation’ and ‘incredibly damaging to the Liberal Party’.

So it is everybody’s fault that Guy lost, except the right body – him. Rowan Dean, Terry Barnes, James Allan, Alexandra Marshall, and this correspondent, among others, have noted several times in these pages the utterly negative outcome a total lack of centre-right product differentiation has on the Liberal Party’s electoral fortunes.

There are none so blind as those that will not see.

Kevin Andrews has written eloquently, as he always does, about the perceived rights and wrongs of Moira Deeming’s actions last March and he makes some valid points.

However, by Pesutto and Guy having another shot at expelling Deeming from the party, as well as attacking Renee Heath and Bev McArthur, the message being sent by the Victorian Liberal Party is that it seems determined to lurch even further left, thus to become even more unelectable.

Sir Robert Menzies’ warning to his daughter Heather nearly 50 years ago about the Victorian Liberal Party being dominated by ‘Liberals with a small l’ – that is to say, Liberals who believe in nothing but who still believe in anything if they think it worth a few votes – has been borne out. At the time Menzies wrote ‘the whole thing is tragic’ just like what is happening now.

If they won’t heed Menzies, Pesutto and Co could learn a thing or two from another conservative woman – and an Italian one at that: Giorgia Meloni.

Meloni knows the tradition of liberal conservatism better than anyone on the centre-right. An unashamed admirer of Sir Roger Scruton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton, among others, she has no fear of the mighty forces of Euro-secularism. Pesutto – and the Liberal Party more broadly – would do well to listen to her.

Her defence of liberal conservatism – as well as the importance of Christianity in the development of our civilisation, and institutions such as the traditional family – is one reason her popularity since taking office has soared.

It was Meloni who famously declared proudly that she is a woman, a mother, a Christian, and an Italian.

Last month Meloni and her ministers stood up to the EU when it enacted new regulations regarding ‘green buildings’, which, in the midst of an energy and cost of living crisis, would have driven millions of Italians into poverty having to restructure their dwellings to comply. Thanks to her, now even the German Greens, who are partners of a coalition government in that country, have begun to push back on this issue.

The week before last Meloni visited London and gave a speech at the Policy Exchange think tank. While the speech’s focus was her support for Ukraine, it also drew on her knowledge of the importance of those such as Scruton and Tolkien in the development of conservative thought.

Meloni declared:

The way is not to erase our home, it is not to give up our freedom or our values: the way is to love our home and to make it even more solid and strong in bad weather. Roger Scruton said it best: ‘the real reason people are conservative is that they are attached to the things they love.’

Sir John Ronald [Reuel] Tolkien wrote: ‘I do not love the bright sword for its sharp edge, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for its glory. I only love that which I defend.’

This is a time of uncertainty and crisis […] From a crisis we can emerge stronger and freer — and we can track the direction of a new path, a path in which we must have the ability to preserve what is precious and irreplaceable. Our identity, our history, our values, the civilisation we built.

The question, therefore, for John Pesutto, and Liberal Party generally, is whether they want to be on Meloni’s winning liberal conservative path, or the path of destruction, not just of themselves, but of what we hold dear: our identity, our history, our values, the civilisation we built.

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