A slogan lifted from one of the ugliest chapters of Australian political history for women is currently rolling through Melbourne’s streets on a billboard, reading “Ditch the Witch” and featuring Premier Jacinta Allan in a witch’s hat.
It is a declaration that a woman who dares to lead deserves to be reduced to folklore, to caricature, to something less than human, regardless of what you think of her politics.
And worse? Someone paid for this “campaign”, with the billboard partly funded by the owner of Gotham City brothel, who has publicly insisted the billboard wasn’t sexist and that the Premier simply deserved it. Yes, a man who profits from the commercial transaction of women’s bodies decided he was the right person to adjudicate what constitutes respect for women in public life.
It’s been fifteen years since Tony Abbott stood, grinning, in front of a “Ditch the Witch” placard outside Parliament House in 2011, directed at then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Australia’s first and still only female Prime Minister.
Now in 2026, this same slogan is refreshed and rebranded, cruising through Melbourne on the side of a truck.
Gillard has already responded to the repurposed slogan, noting on Instagram: “This was a slogan used against me as Prime Minister fifteen years ago. It was roundly condemned then. In the years since, my view has been that things were slowly improving for women in politics. More women are leading, sexism hasn’t gone away but it is less ferocious in the political mainstream, though social media continues to be a toxic sewer. I am saddened to see that improvement cast aside and this tired old trope resurrected.”
Gillard also called on the billboard company to take the signs down immediately, asking, “Why should women and girls in Victoria be subjected to such visible misogyny?”
Gillard was right to condemn the billboards, but I disagree with any suggestion that sexism in politics has progressed; in fact, this illustrates that we have not moved an inch.
The billboard was condemned across party lines. Allan issued a lengthy public statement, writing “sexism just has no place in our political debate, full stop… I care that these attack women. And I care about who’s next”. Voices from many sides of politics have called it out. Good. That is the minimum acceptable response. But condemnation without reckoning is noise. The more disturbing story is not just the billboard itself, but the volume and vehemence of the social media comments rushing to defend it. Ordinary people typing with conviction arguing that the slogan is fair game. That it’s political, not personal. That Allan can’t even define ‘what a woman is’ so her thoughts on sexism are redundant.
And then there is the Herald Sun, which ran a spread on the billboard in its Sunday paper. Notably, and revealingly, the online article was not paywalled — making it one of the few among their content that was not paywalled. What they did not do was call it out forcefully. They reported it as a news event and a controversy, not as misogyny in broad daylight. This is a publication with a documented history of sexualised treatment of women in power, a paper that once published a cartoon depicting Premier Allan naked on a catwalk. The failure to call out the billboard is in itself a form of complicity.
This is not new. Former Victorian Minister for Women Natalie Hutchins described to Women’s Agenda the reality of public office with devastating clarity, “I received worse comments on my social media as Minister for Women than across all my other ten portfolios combined, including Corrections and Youth Justice,” she said.
“The sexist comments ranged from the most disgusting remarks about my appearance to outright hatred. It was relentless, and it was gendered.” Ten portfolios, including prisons and youth justice, and still nothing cut as deep or came as fast as the abuse Hutchins received the moment she was seen to be governing for women.
As Micaela Dreiberg, CEO of Gender Equity Victoria, has observed, “The abuse aimed at conversations about women’s issues isn’t accidental. It’s designed to wear women down, make speaking up feel dangerous, and warn others that advocating for women comes at a personal cost”.
A billboard truck rolling through Melbourne is a warning, public and deliberate, to every woman who might consider stepping into leadership, particularly political leadership. The message is not “we disagree with your policies.” The message is we will make you a witch, we will make you a bitch and we will fund it.
Those funding this, defending it, and applauding it in comment sections are revealing something about themselves, not about the Premier. If you cannot critique a political leader on the substance of her decisions, if you must instead reach for her gender and use that as a basis for sexist and misogynistic rhetoric, then you have lost the argument before you have made it. And asking a brothel owner to be a guardian of women’s dignity is, to put it charitably, a long shot.
But here is what truly should haunt us. We wonder, week after week, why family violence rates continue to rise. We are losing a woman to intimate partner violence approximately every week and we cannot bring ourselves to connect the dots between the dehumanisation that happens on a billboard, in a comments section, in a cartoon of a naked premier and the dehumanisation that precedes the violence that ends lives.
Our culture and attitudes towards women are deeply broken. The billboard didn’t create that fracture. It just drove it slowly down the street for everyone to see.