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May 21, 2026 — 5:00am
There is something simple yet beguiling about a Newton’s cradle, the demonstration of Sir Isaac’s third law of motion that sat on the desk of everyone’s favourite high school science teacher.
Alas for the Victorian Liberal Party, the theory behind those clacking silver balls – that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction – has never quite sunk in.
The political demise of Dinesh Gourisetty after his ill-fated preselection battle against Moira Deeming and the exodus we are now seeing from Liberal Party branches across Melbourne’s western suburbs is a case in point. Deeming emerged the victor but ultimately, her party’s fortunes in the west are the biggest loser.
Gourisetty, you may recall, is the Indian restaurateur who beat Deeming in their pre-selection ballot for the No.1 spot on the Liberal Party’s upper house ticket for the Western Metropolitan Region. He came a cropper hours after the vote when it was revealed he provided a character reference to a convicted child sex offender.
The Liberal Party was blindsided by the revelation and embarrassed by the failure of its candidate vetting. Gourisetty, having spent the previous 15 years working to build his standing in the Liberal Party and the party’s relationship with Melbourne’s fast-growing Indian communities, was pilloried. Deeming kept her seat.
In the two months since, that episode has swung like a wrecking ball through the Liberal Party’s rank and file membership in Melbourne’s west and severed the party’s connection with Indian communities. Not everyone quitting the party is a supporter of Gourisetty, but the botched preselection left many wondering whether the Liberals will ever get serious about representing their neighbourhoods.
Had the flaw in Gourisetty’s judgment been identified earlier, the party could have convinced him to withdraw, sparing him from public humiliation and providing the opportunity for another candidate from the Indian community to run.
The following Liberal Party branch membership numbers, which are closely guarded and unverified by Liberal HQ, were provided to this column in confidence. They are subject to change until the end of this month, which is the deadline for membership renewal. They tell a clear story.
Point Cook was until recently one of party’s largest local branches in the western suburbs, with 114 paid-up members on the books. It currently has 24. The seat is on the Liberal Party’s target list for the November election.
In Tarneit and in Werribee, where the Liberal Party last year got within a few hundred votes of pinching the seat from Labor at a byelection, a combined membership of 175 people has shrunk to just over 50. The rest have either allowed their memberships to lapse or are yet to pay their dues.
The Tarneit branch is made up almost entirely of Indian migrants. On the day of the Western Metropolitan Region preselection ballot, there were about 200 Indian community members spread across western suburbs branches. There is now barely a cricket team left in the party.
The Laverton branch has gone from 47 paid-up members to just 15.
Six months out from a state election in which nearly every seat in Victoria will be in play, the Liberal Party does not yet have candidates for Tarneit, Kororoit, Laverton and Footscray.
Mia Shaw, a Wyndham City councillor who stood as the Liberal Party candidate in Werribee at the last state election, was planning to run again this year but withdrew her application after Gourisetty v Deeming. The fall-out from that preselection is still being felt inside Wyndham City Council where Mayor Preet Singh, having provided a character reference to the same child sex offender, is under pressure to stand down.
Shaw says she has not decided whether to renew her party membership. She is frustrated the party seems to have no better an understanding of the west than it did four years ago, when she ran a poorly supported campaign against then treasurer Tim Pallas.
“The feedback I gave the Liberal Party when I ran in 2022 was that the party needs to genuinely show up in Wyndham and across the west if it wants to win seats out here,” she says. “At the current rate, I can’t see that happening.”
In the local branch of St Albans, Liberals are letting their memberships lapse for another reason. Maria Kerr, a second-generation Italian migrant from Keilor Downs who secured a respectable 25 per cent of the vote in St Albans as the Liberal Party candidate in 2022, quit the party about two weeks ago. She says a branch that not so long ago had 100 members is down to about 15.
Kerr says the exodus has less to do with Gourisetty and Deeming than the change of party leadership.
“Brad Battin resonated with our members,” says Kerr, who is currently serving as the deputy mayor of Brimbank council. “He comes from an area that isn’t affluent and he showed them he could relate to them. When we had a change of leadership, a lot of members who joined because of Brad left in disgust.”
Kerr is now weighing up whether to join the nascent The West Party, One Nation or run in St Albans as an independent candidate.
The collapse of the Liberal membership in Melbourne’s west, which leaves the party without a volunteer base to support local campaigns, comes at a critical juncture for the Coalition, which must win seats in the west in November to have any chance of forming a majority government.
It also leaves Melbourne’s Indian diaspora without a welcoming political home at a time when One Nation, a party built on anti-immigration populism, is preparing to run a statewide campaign in Victoria.
Deeming, meanwhile, appears oblivious to the laws of physics. This week she posted a video, rubbing salt into Gourisetty’s wounds.
Clickety clack.
Chip Le Grand is state political editor.
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