Moira Deeming’s political future in the Victorian Liberals is about to be decided behind closed doors in the final preselection battle for the party’s upper house seats on Sunday.
Liberal members were due to gather at party headquarters for the western metropolitan region convention, where Deeming faces a serious challenge from Dinesh Gourisetty, a prominent figure in Melbourne’s fast-growing Indian community.
Trung Luu, a sitting upper house MP, was also competing for the top spot on the ticket.
Gourisetty, Luu and Tim Beddoe, a former Liberal candidate for the seat of Maribyrnong at last year’s federal election, have also nominated for the second spot.
Deeming was among four sitting conservative upper house MPs whose preselections have been challenged.
Her initial preselection in 2022 created controversy due to her views on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.
Her profile then surged after she was expelled from the Liberal party room in 2023.
The expulsion came after she threatened legal action against the then leader, John Pesutto, for his comments following her involvement in a rally gatecrashed by neo-Nazis. Deeming ultimately won the defamation fight, leading to Pesutto losing the leadership in 2024.
She was brought back into the party room by his successor, Brad Battin, and appointed as the “leader’s representative to the western suburbs” – a role that was not continued under the current leader, Jess Wilson.
Despite backing from high-profile conservatives, including the former prime minister Tony Abbott and media commentator Peta Credlin, Liberal sources have maintained for months that Deeming would not be able to stave off the challenge.
Gourisetty was understood to have built strong support across western suburbs branches, while the party’s executive committee was skewing more moderate under president, Philip Davis.
Wilson, who has said she will vote for every sitting MP in the preselection ballots, has provided Deeming with a reference describing her as an “articulate and effective advocate for our party’s values in a part of Melbourne where people are increasingly interested in voting for change”.
“The Liberal party needs candidates like Moira in Melbourne’s west, which will be such an important battleground for the 2026 state election,” Wilson wrote.
Abbott said the move to oust Deeming was a “death wish”, while Credlin described her as a “rare individual” capable of uniting conservatives, disaffected Labor voters, working-class and migrant communities. “I have never met a more tenacious, more resilient and more fearless person than Moira,” it reads.
During the preselection process, Deeming complained to the party’s executive, alleging irregularities in the delegate selection process, including early voting, a lack of ID checks and ineligible members being allowed to vote across several branches. She had called for the ballots to be declared invalid and re-run, but the executive rejected her request.
There have also been internal discussions about a potential move to One Nation if Deeming loses the preselection contest – although her supporters insist she was not contemplating this. One senior Liberal source claimed her concerns around the branch votes are “laying the groundwork” for a potential defection.
About 70 people were expected to take part in Sunday’s vote, including delegates from the western suburbs branches, a random pool of metropolitan Melbourne members and the executive. Phones of those in attendance will be confiscated, with the final result expected at about 3pm.
It comes after Bev McArthur, a conservative powerbroker and the opposition’s leader in the upper house, survived a challenge by the former Geelong mayor Trent Sullivan on Saturday. McArthur will remain on the top spot on the western Victoria ticket with conservative Graham Watt, a former lower house state MP, second.
A source closer to McArthur described the win as a “crushing blow” to Davis’ moderate grouping and a “rebuke of those in the party that underestimated Bev’s popularity and community support”.
Last weekend, Renee Heath withstood a challenge for the top spot in eastern Victoria by the journalist and author Sue Smethurst. Ann-Marie Hermans was relegated to second position on the ballot in the south-eastern metropolitan region, by Phillip Pease.
