Frank Puleo, the owner of the Gotham City brothel in South Melbourne, has a solution to the crime wave that has lately affected the city’s hospitality venues, including his own, which was the target of a drive-by shooting in April.
The solution, produced by Puleo and some other like-minded people, can be expressed in just three words: Ditch the witch.
This was the slogan (derivative but ever-powerful) featured in an advertisement that has been driven around Melbourne on the back of a truck.
The ad campaign, which reportedly cost over $100,000, featured a huge picture of said witch – Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan.
She had a black witch’s hat photoshopped on her head, and for reasons unknown, the witch’s hat had a dollar sign superimposed on it (to be fair, dollar signs are probably a preoccupation of any brothel owner).
Allan is frowning – in the semiology of witchery, she is a wicked witch, not a good (read: pretty, nice) one.
It being 2026, we usually have to log on to the internet to experience that kind of naked misogyny – where a powerful woman is reduced to a sexist trope, something which both diminishes and demonises her, without ever bothering itself with the substance of what she says, let alone what she does.
But this message was refreshingly frank.
It didn’t hide behind an anonymous social media handle, nor was it nestled within long hours of a manosphere podcast.
It was just there, right out in the open, being driven around the streets of Australia’s second-largest city.
Puleo said the sign was not sexist, just an honest reflection of Victorians’ disgust for their premier. Ten points for Trumpian audacity.
“[Allan] doesn’t answer questions. She’s not accountable to everything,” he said.
“It’s just how people are feeling. That’s what they’re resorting to. That’s not a political ad. It’s basically what the Victorian public feel.”
The open airing of the misogyny is bracing in its honesty.
It really is impossible to deny or ignore it when it’s on the back of a diesel-powered vehicle, edging its way through commuter traffic.
How many little girls would have seen “ditch the witch” while being driven to soccer training or to grandma’s house, or while hopping on the tram to meet their friends for bubble tea in town?
How many would have observed and absorbed it, and along with it, the silent message that women can always be denigrated for their looks, and for what power they might hold, in a way that men can’t?
How many young boys, too, going about their business, would have breathed in that message, without even knowing it?
Those kids are too young to remember the last time we saw this sign in political life in this country as part of the misogynistic wave that rose during the short term of our first female prime minister, Julia Gillard.
That was 15 years ago, but since then, we have seen a full-throated resurgence of online misogyny, powered by the darker forces within the MAGA movement, which inevitably spills out into “real” life.
Affecting real girls and real women.
Gillard condemned the sign, and said in a social media statement that she had believed things had improved for women in politics.
“I am saddened to see that improvement cast aside, and this tired old trope resurrected,” she said.
Allan issued a statement saying that people were entitled to disagree with her but “I care that this attacks women. And I care about who’s next.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Victorian opposition condemned it, as did federal deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume, a Victorian senator. But One Nation leader Pauline Hanson told Allan to “suck it up, sweetheart”.
A sign is just a sign. Hopefully, this one won’t be around for long.
But a sign can be read as a portent, too.
Perhaps it indicates that Australia is becoming like other places in the world, where political disagreement is cause to show disrespect.
And where demonising your political opponent is seen as the best way to win an argument, no matter how stupid.
