“Apparently, if you think that men and women are not fully interchangeable, that marriage is not open to any combination, and that killing babies in the womb is just plainly wrong, you will have no future in the Liberal Party of Victoria.”

These are the words of esteemed legal scholar Dr Augusto Zimmermann, and they aren’t far off the mark.

Zimmermann was of course referring to the inglorious expulsion of first-term MP Moira Deeming from Victoria’s Parliamentary Liberal Party last week.

As previously reported by MercatorNet in March, Deeming gave an address at the ”Let Women Speak” rally in Melbourne. The event’s purpose was to give women a voice to defend their rights, spaces, and sporting categories from invasion by biological males.

Deeming’s critics and activist-journalists have made endless hay from the unfortunate hijacking of the event by a small band of neo-Nazis, who performed a Hitler salute on the steps of Parliament House.

The event itself had broad support from women and men across political and religious divides. To be sure, it was organised by Angela Jones, a left-wing, pro-gay rights Jewish woman. And still unexplained is why Victoria Police made no initial attempts to remove the neo-Nazi gatecrashers and even apparently let them in.

With all of these facts in view, Moira Deeming was nonetheless labelled a “Nazi sympathiser” for her involvement in the event. Even many of Deeming’s own colleagues capitulated to the vacuous narrative and have since called for her ousting, with Victorian Liberal Leader John Pesutto leading the absurd witch hunt.

During an impassioned speech, Deeming — who was raised by a Holocaust survivor — made clear her total abhorrence of Nazi practices. As such, Pesutto was unsuccessful in his bid to expel Deeming from the parliamentary party and had to settle for a nine-month suspension.

To clear her name, Deeming was left with little choice but to take legal action against Pesutto. She engaged renowned defamation lawyer Patrick George, who served the Leader of the Opposition with a defamation notice for his Nazi smear.

In response to Deeming’s legal pursuit of Pesutto, the Victorian Liberal Party voted again on her place in the party during a two-hour party room meeting last week. Deeming lost the vote 19 to 11. She now represents Melbourne’s Western Metropolitan Region as an Independent Liberal. Pesutto has indicated that even her membership of the broader Liberal Party is under consideration.

There is an unmissable irony in a woman being kicked out of her own party for speaking up for women’s rights. The irony is only heightened by the fact that a rabble of reprehensible men were taken to speak on her behalf.

Let women speak indeed.

As Dr Augusto Zimmermann has aptly summarised:

A group of women legally gathered to speak out for women’s rights in Australia. That gathering was crashed by a group of Neo-Nazi males and the state Liberal leader (and the Victorian Premier) refused to listen to that group of women. Instead, they insisted that the Neo-Nazi males who crashed the rally represent and speak for those women. Moira Deeming, a first-term MP, who was verbally and physically attacked at the rally on the steps of Parliament House, was held responsible for the actions of those Neo-Nazi men.

Professor James Allan is another to have issued a searing condemnation of a once-great political party that has raised the white flag to wokeness:

If Pesutto and the bulk of the party room cannot see that they are on the wrong side of this dispute — in free speech terms, in terms of travelling down the ‘guilt by association’ road, in preferencing the transgender activists over women, by responding almost immediately in line with the lefty social media framing of issues … then it deserves to lose and lose badly.

The smears against Moira only stick for those fully committed to the woke worldview.

To everyone else, she is, at worst, an unsuspecting if slightly disgruntled victim. At best, she is a national hero. And history will smile on her for her rare display of courage.