Back in 2023, the Victorian Liberal Party tore itself apart over her appearance at a rally that was gate-crashed by neo-Nazis - she’d been invited to speak, they hadn’t been invited at all, and she instantly condemned their presence. She was expelled from the party room anyway, sued then-leader John Pesutto for defamation, and won: a Federal Court judge found he’d defamed her, awarded her $300,000, and Pesutto resigned. Genuine vindication.
This background is what makes the most recent chapter so perplexing. In June, Deeming accused fellow Liberal MP Matthew Guy of grabbing her in a violent headlock. Police reviewed CCTV and found “no offence detected” - the footage showing Guy sitting at a table, placing his hand on Deeming’s shoulder to pull her in and say something over the noise, then doing the exact same thing to the man sitting next to her moments later. Hardly the picture of a predatory headlock.
Guess which part of this story got wall-to-wall coverage, and which got a shrug. The original headlock allegation ran everywhere. The CCTV finding that demolished it barely rated a mention - and Guy’s own response to it, a genuinely heartfelt statement about what it’s like to be presumed guilty on an accusation alone, got almost none: “The Premier and the Attorney-General yesterday told every Victorian male over 40, they don’t have your back. They never believe you. In [their] eyes, you’re guilty before proven innocent.”
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It’s a different mechanism to the one driving the Albo and Price stories - Deeming isn’t politically protected by anyone, quite the opposite. What happened here is simpler and, in some ways, more revealing: the allegation fitted a story editors already believe. The exoneration didn’t. So, one got covered, and the other got buried.
Most of the media manipulation I’ve been describing pushes the same subtext: men are dangerous. That’s what worries me - not the individual stories, but the effect. Women absorb this stuff day after day, story after story, until “women good, men bad” stops being a media reflex and becomes how they actually see the man standing in front of them.
Witness the “man versus bear” debate that went viral last year - women were asked whether they’d rather be stuck in a forest with a strange man or a bear, and most of them picked the bear. It’s pretty funny as a thought experiment. Considerably less funny once you watch that same instinct show up in real life, shaping how a woman reacts to an actual roadside rescue.
Which brings me to a recent ABC story promoted as a “terrifying roadside assistance ordeal!” It involved a young woman driving in the country whose car broke down and she called for help. A contractor turned up in an unmarked car - routine enough, given that her roadside assistance firm, the NRMA, regularly subcontracts to cover rural areas when it doesn’t have its own people nearby.
Yet the ABC reported her terror as self-evidently reasonable, and the resulting push to force NRMA contractors into uniforms and carrying ID as an unambiguous win. Nobody paused to ask about the bloke on the other end of that unmarked car: out on the road late at night, in whatever miserable weather, doing a helpful job - and greeted as if he was the bear.
That’s why these stories matter. The selective outrage, the buried evidence, the silenced judges - all in service of protecting the feminist narrative, not the truth. And that needs calling out. Loudly.
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Which brings me to Moira Deeming, a Victorian state MP whose courage I’ve long admired.
Back in 2023, the Victorian Liberal Party tore itself apart over her appearance at a rally that was gate-crashed by neo-Nazis - she’d been invited to speak, they hadn’t been invited at all, and she instantly condemned their presence. She was expelled from the party room anyway, sued then-leader John Pesutto for defamation, and won: a Federal Court judge found he’d defamed her, awarded her $300,000, and Pesutto resigned. Genuine vindication.
This background is what makes the most recent chapter so perplexing. In June, Deeming accused fellow Liberal MP Matthew Guy of grabbing her in a violent headlock. Police reviewed CCTV and found “no offence detected” - the footage showing Guy sitting at a table, placing his hand on Deeming’s shoulder to pull her in and say something over the noise, then doing the exact same thing to the man sitting next to her moments later. Hardly the picture of a predatory headlock.
Guess which part of this story got wall-to-wall coverage, and which got a shrug. The original headlock allegation ran everywhere. The CCTV finding that demolished it barely rated a mention - and Guy’s own response to it, a genuinely heartfelt statement about what it’s like to be presumed guilty on an accusation alone, got almost none: “The Premier and the Attorney-General yesterday told every Victorian male over 40, they don’t have your back. They never believe you. In [their] eyes, you’re guilty before proven innocent.”
It’s a different mechanism to the one driving the Albo and Price stories - Deeming isn’t politically protected by anyone, quite the opposite. What happened here is simpler and, in some ways, more revealing: the allegation fitted a story editors already believe. The exoneration didn’t. So, one got covered, and the other got buried.
Most of the media manipulation I’ve been describing pushes the same subtext: men are dangerous. That’s what worries me - not the individual stories, but the effect. Women absorb this stuff day after day, story after story, until “women good, men bad” stops being a media reflex and becomes how they actually see the man standing in front of them.
Witness the “man versus bear” debate that went viral last year - women were asked whether they’d rather be stuck in a forest with a strange man or a bear, and most of them picked the bear. It’s pretty funny as a thought experiment. Considerably less funny once you watch that same instinct show up in real life, shaping how a woman reacts to an actual roadside rescue.
Which brings me to a recent ABC story promoted as a “terrifying roadside assistance ordeal!” It involved a young woman driving in the country whose car broke down and she called for help. A contractor turned up in an unmarked car - routine enough, given that her roadside assistance firm, the NRMA, regularly subcontracts to cover rural areas when it doesn’t have its own people nearby.
Yet the ABC reported her terror as self-evidently reasonable, and the resulting push to force NRMA contractors into uniforms and carrying ID as an unambiguous win. Nobody paused to ask about the bloke on the other end of that unmarked car: out on the road late at night, in whatever miserable weather, doing a helpful job - and greeted as if he was the bear.
That’s why these stories matter. The selective outrage, the buried evidence, the silenced judges - all in service of protecting the feminist narrative, not the truth. And that needs calling out. Loudly.
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