We began this week with a billboard. A truck rolling through the streets of Melbourne, funded to the tune of $105,000 by a group that includes a brothel owner, bearing the image of Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan photoshopped into a witch’s hat. The slogan on the billboard was “Ditch the Witch”.
We ended the week with graffiti on a Melbourne tram stop timetable. The words were “Rape Jacinta Allan”.
That is how fast this goes. That is how quickly the dial moves when we allow misogynistic language to go unchallenged. While political leaders were busy issuing statements condemning the billboard, the comment sections on newspaper articles and social media pages were busy doing something else entirely. They were justifying it, celebrating it and inviting worse.
Liana Papoutsis, a counsellor, academic, founding member of Victoria’s Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council, and a woman with lived experience of family violence, highlighted what our national conversation continues to shy away from: that the misogyny directed at a woman in power and the misogyny that kills women behind closed doors are not separate phenomena. She was met, as women who tell hard truths so often are, with derision. But Liana isn’t wrong, she says, “The language we use in public life teaches people what women are worth. When we dehumanise women on trucks and tram stops, we are telling every perpetrator of family violence that the culture is on their side.”
The proof was in the comments section. The woman who replied beneath Liana’s video “You are wildly incorrect in every single way. Also, Jacinta Allan deserves everything she gets” is not an anomaly. She is a symptom of a culture that has marinated so long in the normalisation of gendered hatred that some women have internalised it completely, and become its most enthusiastic defenders.
The culture is on their side. Look at the evidence.
We are in June 2026. Approximately 30 women have already been killed in Australia this year at the hands of family violence. Thirty women. Thirty daughters, sisters, mothers, partners. And we are debating whether calling a female Premier a witch is really that bad. Whether those uncomfortable with misogyny need to “suck it up, sweetheart” — thank you, Pauline, for providing the roadmap to exactly where dismissiveness of this kind leads.
The United Nations has made clear that femicide does not happen in isolation. Femicide sits on a continuum of violence that begins with controlling behaviour, threats, and harassment, including online harassment. Language is the foundation of that continuum. It is how abusers construct a world in which their targets are not fully human, where a Premier is a witch, where a woman in power deserves whatever, she gets, where a tram stop can advertise sexual violence as casually as it advertises train times.
When young girls walk past that tram stop timetable, they are not just seeing graffiti. They are receiving a lesson on how the world views women who step into public life. When teenage boys see it, some of them, particularly those already navigating the poisoned waters of online misogyny and toxic masculinity, have something confirmed that they were beginning to believe. They see that it is permitted and, in some corners of this culture, celebrated.
There is no version of this that is “just words.” Words have always been the architecture of violence.
Legacy media bears its share of responsibility here. The rot that we now see cascading through the unmoderated sewers of social media comment sections did not emerge from nowhere. It was cultivated in newsrooms and on opinion pages that, over decades, decided that gendered contempt for women in leadership was good copy. That it was sharp. That it sold papers. And now it sells something far more dangerous.
And here is where I find myself arriving at a profound and painful hypocrisy. I advocate for more women to enter politics. I believe deeply that more women at decision-making tables means better policy, more representative government, a democracy that actually reflects the nation it governs. I have said it in rooms and on platforms, and I will keep saying it because it is true.
But why would any woman want to do this?
Why would any woman, looking at what Jacinta Allan has endured this week from the billboard, to the graffiti, the comment sections, the men who funded a $105,000 campaign of gendered humiliation, look at that and think yes, that is a role I want? And the Victorian state election is still five months away. This is the just the beginning.
I am tired of the cycle of outrage, condemnation, statements, and then the next escalation. I am tired of the woman in the comment section who doesn’t see herself in the graffiti on the tram stop, who thinks her willingness to call another woman a witch protects her from the same fate. It does not.
You do not have to like Jacinta Allan’s politics. You are not required to vote for her. Democracy exists precisely so that you can disagree loudly and hold leaders accountable. But accountability looks like scrutiny, debate, policy critique not a photoshopped witch’s hat, not sexual violence scrawled across public infrastructure.
No woman and no person deserves this.
This is about what kind of country we are choosing to be, in the months between now and November, and in every election and every comment section and every tram stop after that. Thirty women this year alone have told us where this leads in the most devastating language possible.