From corflute craziness to ‘Trumpet' texts, election day can't come soon enough

The Age

29-04-2025

I'm almost scared to vote in my hotly contested electorate. I've had ankle surgery and I'm worried I won't be able to navigate my clumsy crutches through the sea of signs and corflutes at my polling booth.
It's sign city in this marginal seat and every second fence seems to have a smiling face. It's ridiculous how many there are – as if a vacillating voter will be swayed by this visual pollution.
But then, the corflute is a consequence of our not caring. With so many disengaged, disheartened and disenfranchised voters, candidates need name recognition at the very least. Social media algorithms target us in bubbles, but we've all seen the conspicuous corflutes (and we've all received the annoying 'Trumpet' texts).
If posters are the only way to universally access voters, they're bound to attract passion. The skirmishes around signs range from scary to silly.
Independent candidate for Calare Kate Hook's posters were ripped down and had metal stakes poked through the face. It takes a certain kind of fury to do that to an inanimate object, and any woman who feels welcome in politics after seeing the image is crazy-brave. Hook says it's 'a distraction from the issues of homelessness, affordable housing, childcare and climate change' that she wants to talk about.
Similarly, there's the video of Dr Greg Malham; in his blue singlet and shorts, he takes out his rage on independent Monique Ryan's poster and boasts about 'burying the body under concrete' as he stomps on it. He has apologised, but this man operates on spines that now shiver at his misguided machismo. Melbourne seems to be showing nastier behaviour this election – neo-Nazis have crashed a sacred event to get attention and volunteers have been spat at.
In Sydney, we've seen sillier expressions of subliminal rage in the staking of land claims.
The Mosman women using a Chanel lipstick to draw a pig face on an election poster for the MP for Warringah Zali Steggall says everything about the entitlement of the ladies who possibly liquid-lunched, and none about their MP. Not since Kath and Kim's alter egos Pru and Trude have we seen such a show of clueless entitlement and petty obsession with such clipped vowels. If you wrote these lasses in a comedy sketch, you'd be accused of being too reductive. I feel sorry for the people of Mosman – these women just set your stereotype in stone for the next decade. Yet the word 'pig' on a face in lipstick still slightly sickens me.