If British women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen goes ahead with the defamation suit she is reportedly considering taking out against John Pesutto, the consequences could reach far beyond the personal fortunes of the Victorian opposition leader. After all, coming as soon as it does after the defamation suit lodged in the Federal Court last week by expelled Vic Lib MP Moira Deeming, it is not as if Mr Pesutto’s pen portrait of Ms Keen can be dismissed as an aberration. Or, as Lady Bracknell might put it: To lose one’s sense of proportion when dissing one woman may be regarded as carelessness, but to do it with two women looks like policy – especially when one of those women doesn’t have peroxide hair and was, before the tumbril came for her, considered a model of Victorian Liberalism. Conservatives of every c-size can only hope that some greater good comes of the whole business. At the very least, a guilty verdict in either case should make Mr Pesutto and his interstate counterparts think twice before trying to bolster their party’s dwindling credibility by defaulting to woke attitudes which are diametrically at odds with the core values of their base. But the public statements which have gotten Mr Pesutto into trouble take this kind of cravenness to a shameful new low. It is one thing for a state opposition leader to resign him or herself to making the best of ill-considered policies put in place by a sell-out Coalition prime minister with regard to, say, the achievement of unachievable emissions objectives. It is quite another to imply unsolicited parallels between someone who decides to attend, or address, a legal public gathering in 21st century Australia, and someone who decides to euthanise all the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with mental disability in 1930’s Europe. The deployment of what – for fear of litigation as much as cancellation – we may soon have to refer to as ‘the other N word’ used to be the hysterical resort of the far-left fringe when faced with anything like a dissenting opinion on race and immigration. But in recent years calling someone a Nazi has become the lazy default of many of the less loony left on all kinds of issues when they simply find themselves bereft of more Socratic methods of debate. When asked for their opinion of people who, having seen the evidence that vaccinations, masks and social distancing might not stop them contracting or spreading Covid as effectively as the ABC’s Dr Norman ‘bedside bollocks’ Swan was telling them, for example, many otherwise moderate politicians (on both sides of the fence, it must be said) openly aligned themselves with – or at least refused to gainsay – the pitchfork pundits who branded such people ‘granny-killers’ – a charge against which even Heinrich Himmler would never have had to defend himself. But as far as I can tell Mr Pesutto is the first Australian politician on the so-called centre-right to sing from this particular songsheet. In identifying Keen and Deeming with the ignorance and bigotry espoused by a small number of nutters who attended that meeting with the express intentions of disrupting it, Mr Pesutto presumably hoped to be seen to share the largely pro-trans rights attitudes of younger, urban voters. We will have to wait until November 2026 to find out whether or not any of those younger urban voters remember this gambit – and reward Mr Pesutto for having been ‘down’ with them on this issue if not on anything else. In the meantime, the fact that he felt he could make references to Nazis without fear of raising young Australian eyebrows is a sad reflection of current high school education standards. Calling somebody a Nazi – or even implying that they associate with people who have Nazi sympathies, is offensive, and those who use the word should know that when they do it there might be consequences. And that those consequences can be as bad for the users as the they are for their targets.