SANDY FRASER | Youth | CONTACT
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has this week been targeted by a shocking and largely unoriginal advertising campaign designed to discredit her leadership ahead of the state’s election.
From Friday night onwards, billboard trucks bearing a doctored image of Allan and the slogan “Ditch the Witch” have been spotted in and around Melbourne’s CBD.
The campaign reportedly cost over $100,000, and was funded by opponents of the Victorian Labor Government, who clearly cannot help but descend into gender-based, bottom of the barrel rhetoric.
While denigrating female leaders seems to grant these opponents some sort of momentary feeling of power, it has time and again proven to do very little except radicalise female voters into voting against their cause.
About ten years ago, Tony Abbott launched an almost identical 'Ditch The Witch' campaign to attack his opponent Julia Gillard.
And though it gave way to Auspol’s arguably most iconic speech of all time, it also kicked off a decade of misery for the Liberal party, who have not stopped haemorrhaging female voters since the moment the former PM stood in front of that sign.
The damage was eventually consummated when Abbott lost his own seat to the first ever 'Teal' candidate, Zali Steggall, forcing him to watch the collapse of the party he once led from the sidelines as over ten more Independent Teal candidates comprehensively dismantled the Liberal Party's entire inner-city base.
The misogynistic treatment of Julia Gillard is recognised as the official moment that partisan Australian politics became gendered, as an entire generation of female Liberal voters found themselves increasingly disgusted by the party they once willingly supported through the Howard years.
And though most of them fled to Independent candidates, this phenomena only benefitted the Labor Party, as the Liberals lost every single oceanside and harbourside electorate in the country - except for their die hard supporters in the Shire.
The flow in preferences is perhaps even better demonstrated by Albanese's most recent 94 seat landslide victory, where Peter Dutton lost his own seat.
As Victoria's right wing continues to reap the consequences of 262 days in lockdown and demonstrate absolutely no desire to move beyond personal attacks, the nation awaits their next endeavor into tactless jibes that work in reverse effect.
