The Campaign and Its Backers

A billboard truck carrying the slogan "Ditch the Witch" — accompanied by an edited image of Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan wearing a witch's hat — circulated through Melbourne on Friday night, drawing immediate condemnation from across the political spectrum. The Age subsequently identified Franco Puleo, owner of the Gotham City brothel in South Melbourne, as one of the funders behind the campaign. Puleo admitted to helping finance the effort, which cost $105,000 in total and was underwritten by Puleo along with a number of other local business owners.

Three separate billboards were involved, each depicting Allan as a witch alongside commentary targeting community safety and government mismanagement — framing the imagery as substantive political criticism rather than personal attack. The campaign's backers appear to have been motivated primarily by policy grievances, though the vehicle chosen to express those grievances is what has generated the bulk of public reaction.

Responses From the Premier and the Prime Minister

Allan moved quickly to define the terms of the debate. In social media posts, she characterised the effort as "a secret and well-funded political campaign" and described the tenor of such attacks as "corrosive" to democratic discourse. She drew a distinction between robust political disagreement — which she acknowledged as a legitimate feature of democracy — and targeted attacks on women in leadership, which she said were unacceptable. Allan also flagged concern about the downstream effect of such rhetoric on future generations, calling sexism incompatible with political debate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned the campaign as "sexist" and said it "has no place in public life," adding that political contests should be fought on ideas rather than personal attacks. His intervention elevated the episode from state-level controversy to a federal talking point within hours.

Cross-party condemnation extended to the opposition. Deputy Liberal Leader Jane Hume, whose party would stand to benefit electorally from anti-Allan sentiment, nonetheless described the billboard truck campaign as "unacceptable" — a notable signal that the imagery had crossed a line even among those with partisan incentive to stay quiet.

Gillard's Echo

The slogan is not new, and its history carries weight. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard expressed disgust at seeing "Ditch the Witch" revived, noting that the same phrase was deployed against her during her tenure as Australia's first female prime minister. SBS News reported her condemnation alongside Albanese's.

We have seen this pattern before. The original "Ditch the Witch" placard — held aloft at a Canberra rally in 2011 while then-Opposition Leader Tony Abbott stood nearby — became one of the most scrutinised images of that political era, triggering a parliamentary reckoning over misogyny in public life that culminated in Gillard's now-famous parliamentary speech. The fact that the same slogan is operational again, fifteen years later and in a more elaborate paid-media format, is a data point about the durability of certain attack lines in Australian political culture — and about the calculations some actors make when funding them.

A Discordant Note: Hanson's Response

Not everyone framed the episode through the lens of gender-based harm. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson pushed back directly, telling Allan to "suck it up, sweetheart" in response to the sexism complaint. Hanson's position was rooted in personal precedent: she referenced that former Nationals leader Tim Fischer once called her a witch and said she should be burned at the stake, arguing that she had faced similar language without demanding the same degree of political solidarity. Her intervention complicated the neat bipartisan consensus against the campaign and introduced a thread of internal debate about what constitutes a disqualifying attack versus the ordinary rough-and-tumble of political life.

Animal Justice Party state MP Georgie Purcell added her voice to those calling out the imagery, commenting on Allan's post that sexism should not function as a tool within political disagreement or debate.

The Funding Picture and What It Signals

The disclosure of Puleo's involvement — and the $105,000 price tag — reframes the campaign from a fringe stunt into a coordinated, commercially funded political operation. That a brothel owner is among the identified funders is arresting in its own right, but the more structurally significant detail is the network of local business owners apparently willing to pool resources for a campaign of this kind outside of formal party or registered political entity structures.

Allan's characterisation of it as "secret and well-funded" points to a question of disclosure. Australia's electoral financing laws require registration and disclosure thresholds for political donations to registered parties and candidates, but third-party campaigners operate under a distinct and, critics have long argued, less transparent regulatory framework. Whether the $105,000 spend triggers reporting obligations under Victorian or federal law is a question campaign finance regulators may now face.

The broader context here is the state of Victoria's political environment heading toward the next state election, due in November 2026. Allan's government has faced persistent criticism over crime and community safety — the exact issues the billboards invoked alongside the witch imagery. The campaign's funders appear to have calculated that visual provocation would amplify a message they believe is not breaking through through conventional channels. The backlash, and the volume of political figures who stepped forward to condemn it, suggests they may have miscalculated the ratio of attention generated to credibility expended.

What Comes Next

The immediate political consequence has been to generate sympathy for Allan from voices she would not otherwise expect — including from the federal government and from across party lines. In that sense, the campaign's effect has been, at least in the short term, the inverse of its stated intent.

The more durable question is whether the condemnation translates into any regulatory or legislative response. Victoria has previously legislated against certain forms of political advertising, and the episode renews scrutiny on the adequacy of third-party campaign finance disclosure. It also reopens a conversation — one that surfaces reliably in Australian politics but rarely reaches resolution — about the relationship between political speech, gendered attack language, and the structural barriers facing women who seek or hold public office.

For practitioners in campaign strategy, electoral law, and political communications, the episode is instructive on multiple levels: as a case study in how funding opacity becomes the story, as a reminder that historical resonance can overwhelm a campaign's intended message, and as evidence that cross-party condemnation, however swift, does not by itself alter the incentive structures that produce such campaigns in the first place.