A Controversial Witch Campaign Targeting Australia's Victorian Premier — What Sparked Outrage

What Happened

A truck with a billboard circulated through Melbourne on Friday night displaying the phrase "Ditch the Witch" alongside an edited image of Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan wearing a witch's hat. The campaign drew sharp criticism from politicians across all parties.

The Age newspaper revealed that Franco Puleo, owner of the Gotham City brothel in South Melbourne, helped fund the effort. Puleo confirmed he was involved, along with several other local business owners. The total cost was $105,000.

Three separate billboards appeared in the campaign. Each showed Allan as a witch and included messages about crime and government performance. The funders said they meant it as political criticism, not a personal attack.

How Allan and National Leaders Responded

Allan responded quickly on social media, calling the campaign "a secret and well-funded political campaign" that was corrosive to democracy. She separated this from ordinary political disagreement — which she said was normal and acceptable — but drew a line at attacks targeting women in leadership, which she called sexism and unacceptable.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped in within hours. He condemned the campaign as "sexist" and said it "has no place in public life," adding that elections should be fought over ideas, not personal attacks. His involvement lifted the issue from a state-level row to national attention.

Even the opposition acknowledged a problem. Deputy Liberal Leader Jane Hume, whose party would normally benefit if Allan looked weak, called the billboard truck campaign "unacceptable." That signal — disagreeing with your own side's interest — suggested the imagery had crossed a line many politicians couldn't defend.

Why This Phrase Has History

"Ditch the Witch" is not new. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Australia's first female prime minister, expressed disgust at seeing the slogan used again. SBS News reported that she condemned it alongside Albanese.

The original "Ditch the Witch" sign was held up at a Canberra rally in 2011 while then-Opposition Leader Tony Abbott stood nearby. It became one of the most talked-about images of that era and sparked a parliamentary debate about sexism in public life. Gillard's response included a now-famous speech in parliament about misogyny. That the same phrase has surfaced again fifteen years later—this time in a paid advertising campaign—tells us something: certain attack lines stick around in Australian politics because people keep using them.

A Different Voice: Pauline Hanson

Not everyone saw the issue through the lens of gender-based harm. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson pushed back, telling Allan to "suck it up, sweetheart." Hanson drew on her own experience: she recalled that former Nationals leader Tim Fischer once called her a witch and said she should be burned at the stake. She argued she had faced similar language without demanding the same political support Allan was receiving. Her intervention complicated what had looked like a united front and opened a debate about where the line sits between rough campaign tactics and genuinely disqualifying attacks.

Animal Justice Party state MP Georgie Purcell also spoke up, saying sexism should not be a tool in political disagreement.

What the Funding Tells Us

Learning that Puleo and other local business owners funded the campaign—spending $105,000 to do it—changed how people understood the effort. It was no longer a fringe stunt. It was an organized, money-backed political operation run outside the normal party structures.

This raises a question about disclosure. Australia has rules requiring people and companies who donate to registered political parties to report who they are and how much they gave. But groups that run independent campaigns operate under different rules that are, according to critics, less transparent. Whether the $105,000 spent here needed to be reported is something election regulators may now have to determine.

The timing matters. Victoria has its next state election in November 2026, and Allan's government has faced sustained criticism over crime and safety—the very issues the billboards mentioned alongside the witch imagery. The campaign's funders appear to have believed that a shocking visual would get attention for a message they thought wasn't breaking through in normal ways. But the backlash was swift and broad, suggesting they may have misjudged how much damage the approach would do to their own credibility.

The Unexpected Outcome

In the short term, the campaign has had the opposite effect from what its funders intended. Allan has received sympathy from political figures and parties that would not normally support her—including the federal government and opposition leaders. That is not what the billboard truck was meant to achieve.

The bigger question now is whether this episode leads to any changes in law or regulation. Victoria has restricted certain kinds of political advertising before. This campaign raises old questions about third-party campaign finance disclosure and about the relationship between political speech, attacks on women in power, and the actual barriers women face when they run for office or govern. These conversations happen regularly in Australian politics, but they rarely result in concrete change.

For people who work in campaigns, election law, and political strategy, this episode offers several lessons: funding secrecy can become the main story, historical echoes can drown out what a campaign intended to say, and broad condemnation from multiple parties does not automatically change the incentives that lead some people to fund campaigns like this in the first place.