In his dying days as a Senator – at least for the moment – Gerard Rennick notes: “Moira Deeming says she was shocked to learn Victorian Liberal Party chiefs used Party funds to bail out John Pesutto with a $1.55m loan.

“In a statement to The Australian newspaper, the Liberal MP revealed she had been told senior Liberal MPs and Party officials originally backed a peace deal to settle Mr Pesutto’s legal bill without using Party funds in exchange for her guaranteed preselection.

RESCUE

“Instead, Mrs Deeming said the Party chose to rescue Mr Pesutto with internal funds at a meeting of the administrative committee on Thursday night.”

Rennick goes on to make some pertinent yet obvious points about the Liberal Party.

The working assumption is that the “heavyweights” of the Party – a total misuse of the word “heavyweight” – are bailing out Pesutto in order to avoid a losable by-election.

What must the idiot Liberal donors be thinking? Money well spent, eh?

There are some serious questions. One is – why on earth is Moira Deeming still in the Liberal Party? Another is – why is anyone else?

I guess the only reason any Victorian would ever vote for them would be because Labor’s stench finally became too great. But there is no guarantee the Liberals will pull it off in November 2026, of course.

Labor might well have ditched Jacinta by then, and some of those new metro train lines might be operating. Daniel Andrews will have receded into the past.

Even dim Victorian voters probably have weak memories for past evils and blunders.

Another question. Which of the remaining Liberal stalwarts outside Victoria will call out this latest atrocity and assault on our sense of decency? Even the appalling NSW Liberal Party never stooped this low. Never got into the toilet to this extent.

When it comes to ersatz ayatollahs, you couldn’t score better than Michael Kroger the FOP (Friend of Photios), Baillieu, Kennett and what’s his name from Warrnambool. The other one. Yes, that’s it, Denis Napthine.

He, like Baillieu, was briefly Premier over a decade ago after an absolutely fluke victory over the forgettable technocrat, John Brumby, in 2010.

Other than that brief period of office – you couldn’t call it “power” – the Liberals haven’t governed south of the Murray since the 20^th Century, when, under Kennett, they went on a privatising, outsourcing spree that yielded very little that was good or lasting. That was the Liberals thinking they were consequential.

The Liberals’ incompetence since then has allowed the carpet-bombing of the State with windfarms, the corruption of the public service, the emergence of a dictator even the Chinese admired – the man who maims cyclists and locks up citizens – and the razing to the ground of what semblance of justice existed before Rob Hulls finished the job.

The Liberals’ incompetence gave us get Pell, VicPol and Ashton’s circus, Lawyer X, a freed Tony Mokbel, the gangland wars, rubber bullets fired at the elderly, the tasering of the innocent, billions of dollars in public debt, vanity projects, the Covidisation of the whole population and migrant gangs.

Not to mention the destruction of a once truly great city by a tyrannical brute and now the girlie running the show.

Yes, Labor did all that. Can you blame the Liberal Party for things that others did? Well, yes, you can.

They haven’t once in twenty-six years put up meaningful resistance to the direction of ideological travel.

ELECTIONS

They weren’t just content with being Labor Lite, they have been positively UniParty-esque. And, of course, they couldn’t figure out how to win elections.

Terry Barnes at the Australian Financial Review notes: “Accounting for one-quarter of Australia’s population and economy, when Victoria prospers, Australia prospers. But the Garden State is an overgrown, weed-infested tangle, governed by a fiscally incontinent Labor Party for most of the past 45 years.

“Current premier Jacinta Allan presides over eye-watering debt and poor credit ratings; Australia’s highest-taxing regime; borrowing-funded and hugely over-budget infrastructure projects, including Melbourne’s never-never Suburban Rail Loop; resource-starved schools, hospitals, police and roads; and hard-Left social policy.

“Opinion polls say angry voters want to boot Labor. Yet Allan’s government almost certainly will be re-elected next year, and probably again in 2030 because its Liberal opposition is a political circus run by clowns.”

Little to disagree with there. But is the moral stench the thing that grabs you in this case?

They are a festering amalgam of petty, disgusting factions and navel-gazers content with feathering their own nests. And, clearly, given the events of the past week, they are now even more sleazy than ever. If that is even possible.