Jacinta Allan as an AI witch. Pointed hat. Warts on her chin.

At first it seems like just one more low blow in a race to the bottom from the Liberal Party, a race that Tony Abbott, the Oxford heavyweight Blue, joined in 2011, when he stood before the same slogan and pandered to the brain-stem misogynist in the electorate. His Oxford sparring partner, Nicholas Stafford-Deitsch, the university’s best fighter at the time, remembered him as “crude, with very little technique“. Nothing like a peer review when it comes to lowering the tone.

Between the slides, the Guardian reported, ran advertisements for a brothel. Politics and knocking-shop promo, spliced together on the same screens, a loop built to debase, demean and destroy another woman in power.

Gotham City’s hired trucks carry three giant video screens, and play music. Franco Puleo, owner of the Gotham City brothel in South Melbourne, said he had helped pay for the novel if not sensational campaign initiative. In May he confirmed his trucks were not allowed near schools, kindergartens or “any venues that are female-oriented“. A man whose witch-and-brothel loop is kept clear of the kindergartens has a finely tuned sense of decency.

Sexist? Not at all, said Puleo. “It’s basically what the Victorian public feel.” The brotheleer is no one-trick pony. Why, the man can straddle family values, populist spokesperson and psychic mind-reader in one leap.

What the Victorian public feel about a woman in the top job has form, and it is an animus that doesn’t stop at the Liberal Party.

In 1990 Joan Kirner took over from John Cain, with a recession arriving and the State Bank’s debts falling due. The Herald Sun called her Mother Russia. Its cartoonist drew her, again and again, as a harried housewife in a polka-dot dress. She never owned one. Men, she said, are judged by their contributions, women by their image.

Thirty-three years later Allan took over from Andrews, with the Big Build’s bills falling due. A month in, the Herald Sun drew her naked on a catwalk. By June she was a witch on a truck.

Andrews left at a time of his choosing, three elections won. The woman left holding his invoices was carted out before she could face a single election of her own.

Part 1 took the witch. This piece takes the rest of the loop.

On 30 April, with the truck already on the road selling the brothel, a gunman in a moving car put at least four shots into Gotham City. Police were checking whether it belonged to the wave of firebombings and shootings at Melbourne venues.

A man in a trade Victoria once banned, then licensed, and now treats in its planning law as a shop, same as the corner bakery, his own premises freshly shot up in the city’s crime war, was paying to tell Victorians to ditch the Premier.

Dr Margaret Simons, writing in The Monthly, has a name for this. She calls it “the Fortitude Valley feeling”, the vertigo that comes when the rules say one thing and the street does another. She caught it in Brisbane before Fitzgerald. The Premier and his police commissioner swore Queensland had no illegal casinos. That night her colleagues took her drinking in one, upstairs from a brothel. One of them had written up the denial. The police later told Fitzgerald that nobody really wanted the brothels shut, so they managed them instead. From managing a trade to taking a cut of it is a short walk. Terence Lewis made it, and went to jail.

Corruption, Simons argues, is never a few bad apples. It needs a lot of people who know and do nothing. Truckloads.

Victoria has its own Fortitude Valley now. It sells cigarettes, two doors down from the bakery.

This week, a politer version of the truck arrived in my letterbox, with a Liberal logo where the brothel ads had been.

Jess Wilson wrote to me. Unsolicited, unbidden and unwelcome.

“Our New Liberal Team has a Plan to: reduce crime, lower costs and deliver a government that works.” Details? The letter sends me to ourplan.au.

Take the word “New”. Wilson is the fourth Liberal leader since the 2022 election: Guy, Pesutto, Battin, Wilson. She took the job as a moderate. Kew MP, former Frydenberg staffer, former Business Council of Australia executive.

Take the word “Team”. John Howard liked to call the Liberals a broad church. In Victoria it is a congregation at war with its own pews.

For a decade, moderates have accused the religious right of recruiting branch by branch. In Gippsland, local Liberals told the ABC their branches were being stacked from Pentecostal congregations, including Sale’s City Builders Church. Its pastor’s daughter, Renee Heath, won upper house preselection by 55 votes to 53. Matthew Guy barred her from his party room. John Pesutto let her in. In March the moderates beat Moira Deeming 39 votes to 26. Within a day their own man had been ruled ineligible, and the ballot had to be run again.

Not a broad church. A schism with a membership list.

And who keeps the keys to the vestry? In May the Victorian Liberals made Brian Loughnane state president, at Jess Wilson’s own request. Tony Abbott is the party’s federal president. Loughnane is Peta Credlin’s husband. The New Liberal Team went looking for new blood and found the old firm of tried and tested has-beens, wannabes and rejects.

Then there is Ripon, which takes in Ararat. A leaked spreadsheet showed the party had registered a dead member and two former members to vote in its preselection. One of them, John Ternel, had already been declared dead by his own party in a mass email to members. He had to tell them he was alive. Seriously.

A party that can’t keep its own membership roll breathing wants to run the state.

Part 1 served the lobster. One detail more. The Liberals’ own review, by party elder Tony Nutt, found those who let Matthew Guy go to that dinner “guilty of utter stupidity“. The party made Guy leader again for the 2022 election.

This is the outfit now campaigning on crime and corruption.

Tell the New Liberal Comms Team. Crime is already falling. But “I’m with stupid” is one hell of a campaign slogan.

In April, Wilson declared criminal offending “at an all-time high“. In the year to June, the crime rate fell 3.8 percent. Robbery down 22.9. Aggravated home burglary down 27. Carjackings down a quarter.

Ourplan.au offers not one figure on crime. Just this: “We must reduce crime in our community so Victorians can feel safe again.“

Yes, the tally is still higher than it was three years ago. Look at what is being tallied. The figures the Hun splashes count offences, not incidents. One night, one address, one offender can rack up half a dozen. In 2024, when the offence rate hit its highest since 2016, the number of people offending barely moved. The police minister called the unique offender rate “flat“.

More crimes. Same crooks. Let’s get it into perspective.

Five thousand four hundred people, less than a tenth of one percent of Victorians, account for 40 percent of the crime. Tighten bail and every breach becomes a fresh offence on the tally. The toughness writes its own statistics.

“Break Bail, Face Jail.” Wilson’s slogan may not be new but it is instructive. Every breach a new offence. Every new offence a number for the next letter.

The state’s own Sentencing Advisory Council has said it plainly: longer prison terms do not buy more deterrence. The certainty of getting caught does.

The rest of the plan is already on the statute book. “Adult Crime, Adult Time.” Labor has delivered it. A royal commission into the Big Build. Ben Carroll called one in July. Wilson is selling me a ticket for the bus I’m already sitting on.

The headline promise is “3,000 more police”. Read the fine print: “Filling existing vacancies and funding 1,500 more officers.” Victoria Police has 1,340 vacancies. Nearly half her new police are old jobs nobody can fill.

Does anyone else smell something burning?

Since March 2023 more than 150 tobacco shops in Victoria have burned in a war over the black market.

That market is no rumour. The Bureau of Statistics, testing wastewater, estimates that 80 percent of the tobacco Australians consumed last year came from illicit sources. In 2017 it was 12 percent. The Illicit Tobacco Commissioner puts the figure for cigarettes and vapes lower, at 50 to 60 percent. Take the lower number. It is still a majority.

Why? Price. Excise is now about $1.52 a stick, more than 80 percent of what a legal pack costs. A chop-chop pack goes for about $25. Every smoker in the state can do that sum. Most of them have.

And a shop on every strip does not run for years on price alone. Simons says you would have to be daft not to suspect that bribes helped make the trade normal. Somebody looked away. Somebody may have been paid to.

So the firebombs follow the money, and the money follows the smoker. “Break Bail, Face Jail” lays a hand on neither. Jail the kid with the jerry can and the box of matches, and the market will hire another for the next job.

Geoffrey Watson’s report found connections between the firebombings and organised crime on the Big Build, “at least at the level of individuals involved“. Note how modest that is. Some of the same names. Not a pipeline from the union office to the jerry can. The black market needs no help from the CFMEU. Canberra’s excise made the demand, smokers feed it, and enforcement has let it bloom on every shopping strip.

Wilson has a plan for that too. She launched it at a bakery next door to a firebombed tobacconist. “I will end the tobacco wars in this state,” she said. Her weapons: closure orders stretched from 90 days to 150, no ATMs in tobacco shops, and landlords free to tear up the lease.

Labor’s closure powers became law in September, with fines up to $2.5 million and twenty years’ jail.

Shut the shop for 150 days and the chop-chop moves two doors down. Neither party in Spring Street goes near the price, because the price is set in Canberra. The bakery may want to check its insurance.

The wedge in Part 1 was aimed at a government. This one is aimed at you. Frighten the voter, then sell the cure. Labor bought the script years ago: Adult Time, tougher bail, PSOs in the shopping centres. Wilson is simply bidding higher at the same auction.

Kos Samaras, once Labor’s own deputy campaign director, says Labor should never have veered on to Liberal law and order turf. In 2018 it ignored the African gangs scare, talked about hospitals and schools, and won 55 seats. This year it has campaigned on bail, machetes and ankle monitors. Fight there and, as Samaras puts it, Wilson “does not need to prove crime is out of control”. It’s a blunder that does the opponents’ work for them. Labor has proved it for her.

Meanwhile the biggest crime story in the state is being heard in Collingwood, and it is not the one in my letterbox.

Taskforce Hawk, the police operation behind the CFMEU headlines, had charged 25 people with more than 92 offences by 30 June. Extortion, blackmail, arson, fraud. Since then the charges have run to drugs, weapons and fake safety tickets. Not one charge yet for corruption on a Big Build contract. Not one builder in the dock.

The Labour Hire Authority’s outgoing commissioner, Steve Dargavel, told 60 Minutes in June that the principal contractors “have not been held to account”, because “the laws in this country need to be improved”. “The fish rots from the head,” he said. “The principal contractor is the head. And if the body is rotten, the question has to be why are they suffering it to continue?”

The royal commission’s own counsel has called the famous $15 billion little more than a guess. What the commission has heard so far is not only bikies at the gate, though a former organiser says he put eleven of them on government sites. It is a project director passing on the minister’s office’s view that a contractor would win no more work in Victoria unless it settled with the union. That is hearsay at two removes, and still to be tested.

This week the state’s own Big Build agency handed over a public servant’s notebook with every page blacked out. Counsel assisting called it “profoundly disappointing” that state bodies “only engage with this commission when compelled to do so”. Among the late disclosures were texts referring to the “PPO”, the Premier’s Private Office. Robert Redlich, the former IBAC commissioner, warns that the advisers in that office have a function that is “purely political”, and that a decision made for political gain may be legal, but “it’s corrupt”.

That is the Fortitude Valley feeling. Everyone knows. Nobody hands over the notebook.

Wilson’s letter says nothing about any of it. It promises me a royal commission I already have.

Beyond crime, the plan runs thin. A cash surplus by 2032. A hiring freeze. The treaty scrapped.

Take the last word, “works”. In May, Nine reported the Liberals would preference One Nation ahead of Labor by default. Wilson had ruled out an “alliance”. Her office was firm. “This story is false.” No decision had been made, “in-principle or otherwise”.

On Tuesday she made one. The Coalition will put One Nation ahead of Labor, the Greens and the Victorian Socialists on its how-to-vote cards.

“My job is to change the government here in Victoria,” Wilson said, “and Labor, the Greens and the (Victorian Socialists), they will be at the bottom of the ticket.”

Hours later, One Nation dumped its candidate for Preston over comments about the Holocaust. His name stays on the ballot beside the party’s.

How-to-vote cards matter more than voters like to admit. William Bowe notes in Crikey that more than half of Liberal voters follow the card. In South Australia in March, where One Nation outpolled the Liberals, between 55 and 65 percent of Liberal preferences flowed to Hanson’s candidates.

Wherever the Liberals run third, in Labor’s own outer suburbs and regions, the final count is Labor against One Nation, and Wilson’s card is a delivery vehicle. Another truck. This one will pass roadworthy.

And in the back? One Nation’s 63-page platform, uncosted, to be paid for by cutting the Suburban Rail Loop and the First Nations treaty. Loy Yang A kept burning past 2035. Renewable energy zones abolished. The nuclear ban repealed.

Hanson herself has a gift for prophecy. In June, on Sky News, she told Allan she had heard on the grapevine that the Premier “won’t be there in a couple of weeks“. Before July was out, Allan was gone. Whose grapevine was that?

When Hanson unveiled her Victorian leader, she barred The Age, the ABC and The Guardian from the room. “You get it from me,” she said. “I expect it back from the media.“

Wilson may well win the lower house in her own right. But the lower house is not the whole parliament. Labor expects to be cut to a single upper house seat in almost every region. One Nation is likely to arrive in the Legislative Council in numbers. Every Wilson bill will have to pass through it.

So here is the New Liberal Team. Four leaders since 2022, a church at war with itself, the old Abbott firm behind the counter, a dead man on its Ripon roll and a lobster on its conscience. It asks for the keys, and promises by mail to fix what is already mending.

And its moderate leader, who once called a story about One Nation preferences false, has put Hanson’s party above everyone to her left.

In June, Wilson called the witch truck inappropriate. That sort of language, she said, “should never be used in politics.” On 28 November her card asks Victorians to number Hanson ahead of Labor. Hanson has already told the objectors what she thinks.

Suck it up, sweetheart.

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Part 2 of 3 on the Victorian election. Part 1: The Witch, the Ditch and the Born to Rule Itch. Part 3, Lock Up the Hungry, to follow.