A Familiar Slogan, a New Target

A $105,000 advertising campaign deploying the slogan "Ditch the Witch" against Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has drawn condemnation from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, after The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Franco Puleo — owner of the Gotham City brothel in South Melbourne — admitted to co-funding the campaign alongside other local business owners.

The disclosure cuts through what had been an anonymous operation. Puleo confirmed that he and a coalition of local business figures pooled money to run the campaign, which included billboards and — according to the Herald Sun — a mobile advertising truck spotted circling the Melbourne CBD on a Friday night. The total bill: $105,000.

Who Is Behind It, and Why

Puleo's admission adds a specific face and a stated commercial grievance to what might otherwise have read as generic political agitation. Business owners operating in sectors subject to state-level licensing and regulatory oversight have long had pressure points with Victorian Labor governments; the specifics of Puleo's objections have not been independently detailed beyond his role in funding the campaign.

The campaign's organisational structure — a loose coalition of private business owners rather than a registered political party or lobby group — raises immediate questions under Victoria's electoral finance disclosure framework. Whether the expenditure triggers disclosure obligations under the Electoral Act 2002 (Vic), particularly given the campaign's explicit political target, will likely attract scrutiny from the Victorian Electoral Commission. Campaign finance law distinguishes between issue-based and candidate-directed political advertising; spending of this magnitude directed at a sitting premier in the lead-up to a state election cycle sits in contested territory.

The Gillard Echo

The phrase "Ditch the Witch" is not new to Australian political life. It was deployed prominently against Julia Gillard during her tenure as Prime Minister — most notoriously at a 2011 Canberra rally where then-Opposition Leader Tony Abbott spoke in front of placards carrying that and similarly gendered language. The episode became a landmark in Australian discussions of political misogyny, culminating in Gillard's October 2012 parliamentary speech on the subject, which drew international attention.

Gillard issued a statement on 8 June 2026 saying she was "disgusted" by the reuse of the slogan against Allan. Albanese also publicly condemned the campaign. Both responses arrived without hedging: the former prime minister and the sitting prime minister placed themselves squarely on record.

Allan herself had already been targeted by gendered abuse before this campaign. In 2025, a fire truck at a rally carried the phrase "ditch the b*tch" directed at her — an incident that at the time drew its own criticism but no comparable national political response.

The pattern here is worth naming plainly. We have seen this cycle before — a slogan tested against one female leader, absorbed into the political vocabulary, and then recycled against the next. The specific language functions less as a policy critique and more as a signal: it tells the target and the audience that the attack is personal, gendered, and designed to delegitimise rather than debate. When Gillard faced it, it took years for a broad institutional consensus to emerge that the language itself was the problem, not just its tone. The speed of the bipartisan response this time — from Albanese and Gillard within the same news cycle — suggests that consensus has hardened.

The Broader Political Climate

This episode does not arrive in a vacuum. Victoria heads toward a state election under a Labor government whose federal counterpart is navigating significant electoral pressure from a resurgent One Nation.

The polling data from early and mid-2026 tells a consistent story of Labor vulnerability at the federal level. A Newspoll for The Australian conducted in January 2026 put One Nation's primary vote at 32%, against Labor's 22%. A Resolve poll for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in March 2026 showed One Nation at 29% to Labor's 24%. A YouGov/Sky News poll from late March 2026 had One Nation at 29%, Labor at 27%. By April 2026, a further YouGov/Sky News survey showed the two parties level at 27% each. An AFR/Redbridge/Accent Research poll — the most recent in the series — put One Nation at 31%, with Labor at 28% and the Coalition dropping to 20%.

The same AFR/Redbridge/Accent Research poll found 63% of voters saying Australia is heading in the wrong direction, a result the pollsters linked to the reception of the federal budget.

These are federal numbers, and Victoria's state political dynamics do not map directly onto them. But the mood they reflect — a broad dissatisfaction with established Labor governance — creates permissive conditions for anti-government campaigns of all kinds, including unconventional ones funded by private business coalitions.

What Comes Next

The immediate pressure falls on several fronts simultaneously.

For Puleo and the other business owners involved, the public admission of co-funding a politically targeted campaign of this scale will likely prompt formal inquiries into disclosure compliance. Political expenditure above threshold amounts in Victoria requires registration and reporting; the VEC has both investigative and referral powers.

For Allan, the episode is a two-edged moment. The premier faces the political challenge of managing an anti-government sentiment that the campaign taps into, while the gendered nature of the attack has mobilised sympathetic voices at the highest levels of federal politics on her behalf. Whether that solidarity translates into durable political cover — or whether the underlying dissatisfaction with her government's performance continues to shape the state political environment — is a separate question.

For Gillard, the statement is another data point in an ongoing reckoning with Australian political culture. She has spent years since leaving office working on gender equity in global education through the Global Partnership for Education; her decision to re-enter the domestic political conversation on this issue is deliberate and pointed.

The campaign itself — $105,000, mobile billboards, a recognisable slogan with charged history — is an unusually direct form of non-party political expenditure. It will serve as a case study in how private actors can deploy political advertising outside party structures, and how quickly such campaigns can attract both public controversy and regulatory attention once their funding sources become known.

The legal, political, and cultural questions it raises will take longer to resolve than the news cycle that exposed it.