By Olivia Condous
Melton councillor Moira Deeming has officially been chosen by the Liberal Party as the first preference candidate in the contest for the upper house Western Metropolitan seat at November’s state election.
Cr Deeming, who has been a Watts ward councillor since 2020, was endorsed at a Liberal Party convention on July 23.
Controversial MP Bernie Finn previously represented the Liberal Party as Western Metropolitan MP but was expelled from the party earlier this year after he posted a string of anti-abortion social media posts. He is now leading the Democratic Labour Party.
Cr Deeming is well-known to Mr Finn, as she was the secretary of the March for the Babies anti-abortion rally in 2019, which was organised by Mr Finn.
Mr Finn said he was “good friends” with her.
Speaking at the 2019 rally, Cr Deeming said abortion was a “lie”.
“You are not loving women by getting them abortions,” she said.
In her time as a councillor for Melton, Cr Deeming has been a vocal advocate against the Safe Schools Victoria program, transgender people in sport and transgender people accessing single-sex bathrooms.
In a Facebook post last year, Cr Deeming encouraged her followers to challenge “the lie that ‘female’ is just a feeling”.
“I choose to challenge the erosion of women’s sex based rights to female only spaces, female only services and female only sports,” Cr Deeming said.
Mr Finn said he was “absolutely delighted” that Cr Deeming was slated to come into Parliament.
During a meeting in 2021, former Moonee Valley mayor Cam Nation criticised Cr Deeming’s “homophobic and transphobic views”, after she submitted a question to many Victorian councils on the legal provision “sex based” services and facilities separately to “gender identity based” services.
“This is clearly nothing more than trying to bring divisive and offensive rhetoric into our chambers and into our city,” Cr Nation said at the time.
