Victorian Liberal leader, Jess Wilson, says the man who defeated Moria Deeming for the top spot on the party’s upper house ballot is “not welcome” on her team, after it was revealed he wrote a court character reference for a friend convicted of grooming a 15-year-old girl.
Dinesh Gourisetty, a prominent figure in Melbourne’s fast-growing Indian community, defeated Deeming on Sunday in a preselection vote for the party’s candidates for the western metropolitan region at the upcoming November election.
According to several of Gourisetty’s supporters, he secured preselection with 39 votes, compared to Deeming’s 26, while Trung Luu, another Liberal MP representing the region, received three. Luu retained the second position on the ballot, after a separate vote which Deeming did not contest.
Gourisetty had previously failed to win preselection in 2022, in part due to breaches of the food safety act he pleaded guilty to in 2019.
This time, however, sources said he had the support of multiple branches in Melbourne’s western suburbs and within the party’s executive committee, which had skewed moderate under the president, Philip Davis.
But on Monday morning, shortly before 11am, Davis wrote to the executive committee saying Gourisetty had “advised me this morning he has withdrawn as the candidate” for the western metropolitan region, adding he would “advise next steps” in due course. Guardian Australia has been told Gourisetty is yet to do so.
Davis’s email followed another from a member of the executive committee, who is not aligned with his moderate grouping, to the rest of the executive committee, in which they said they did not support Gourisetty’s preselection.
The email accused the “the party’s factional left” of backing a “pedophile supporter”.
The member wrote that “ditching Moira was always going to be a disaster”, adding this was “before knowing about the court document I received”. They also questioned the vetting process, asking “wtf” the committee responsible for candidate selection was doing.
According to court documents, seen by Guardian Australia, Gourisetty provided a character reference for Kashyap Patel, who in 2024 was convicted and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to charges of grooming, sexually assaulting and transmitting indecent communication to a child under 16.
The charges related to the then 40-year-old married father of two’s grooming and assault of a 15-year-old girl in 2021.
In his sentencing remarks, the judge Peter Rozen found Patel was a “man of otherwise good character as set out in the three character references filed with the court”, including from Gourisetty, who was described as “a good friend of four years”.
In a statement on Monday, Wilson said: “Mr Gourisetty is not welcome on my team. I have made that clear to the party organisation this morning.”
A senior Liberal source said there was “no way” Gourisetty would have been preselected if this information had been known and claimed the distribution of the material after the vote was designed to cause “maximum damage” to the moderate grouping on the executive committee.
During the preselection process, Deeming had complained to the party’s executive, alleging irregularities in the delegate selection, 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.
One Nation state president Warren Pickering said on Sunday his party was “open to discussions” with the Deeming to join the party, due to their “shared conservative values”.
Gourisetty has been contacted for comment.
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