Dan Andrews Matthew Guy Victorian Election
Dan Andrews and Matthew Guy (Image: AAP/Julian Smith)

Usually when looking back at the most pristine moments of weirdness of an election campaign, you’d look to the minors, the amateurs and the no-hopers to get any good material. Not this time. The 2022 Victorian election has given us enough bananas moments to fill two pieces, and the majors have delivered most of those.

That’s a bit Richmond

Lauren O’Dwyer, Labor candidate for Richmond — a seat the ALP is battling to keep out of the hands of the Greens after the retirement of former housing and planning minister Richard Wynne — has described herself as “a proud Yorta Yorta woman”. One of her relatives, however, was far more modest about the family’s Indigenous heritage, insofar as they weren’t convinced it existed. “I was really surprised when I read that on Facebook that she was … a proud Yorta Yorta woman,” they said.

Further, she was allegedly not so proud that she had ever met with any Yorta Yorta elders. “I’m not against this woman per se, but it is very clear that she has no right to procure an identity as a Yorta Yorta without going through the proper channels and going to their elders,” said Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation chief executive Monica Morgan. O’Dwyer has been steadfast: “I know who I am and am proud of my heritage.”

Elsewhere, Labor denied putting up posters featuring a Herald Sun tweet that called the Greens candidate for the area, Gabrielle de Vietri, “out of touch” for her use of a ratepayer-funded nanny, which would have breached electoral law.

Stating a preference

After Deputy Premier Jacinta Allen accused the Liberals of preferencing “Nazis” and “extremists”, the opposition went on the attack, calling the statement a “baseless, disgusting and vile ‘Nazi’ slur campaign”. But as Crikey reported yesterday, at least one candidate the Liberals are preferencing ahead of Labor is a member of neo-Nazi chatrooms, posts anti-Semitic and white supremacist content and smiling selfies at concentration camps. Among others the Liberal Party is directing its preferences to ahead of Labor is Catherine Cumming, who called for Premier Dan Andrews to be turned into a “red mist” at a rally (not in a violent way, she later clarified).

Legal troubles

The weirdness is coming from inside the house when it comes to the Liberal Party. Its former in-house lawyer Chandra Lloyd quit the campaign leadership in early October, because the party wasn’t listening to her advice that some of the actions of the secretariat “may be considered criminal in nature”. She singled out state director Sam McQuestin.

McQuestin has since demonstrated his commitment to the rule of law by starting a local variant of the “stop the steal” narrative, accusing the Victorian Electoral Commission of “interference” in the election process after it announced it was referring a probe into party leader Matthew “call me Matt” Guy and his former chief of staff, Mitch Catlin, to the state’s corruption watchdog.

The Liberal candidate for Mulgrave, Michael Piastrino, who kicked off the 2022 weirdness by promising that under a Liberal government Andrews would be “brought to justice for the murder of 800 people”, has made repeated calls for the election to be delayed in response to leaked footage of “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery requesting money for preference deals.

Enter the Dragan

Timothy Dragan, 26, running in the safe Labor seat of Narre Warren North, looks like an uncharitable cartoon by an unimaginative uni paper of a young Liberal (specs, beard, blue suit), and as it turns out, that’s how he talks too.

Having couched a lot of his early campaign rhetoric around revamping the school curriculum (on account of all the “cancel culture” kids are taught these days, or something … ), Dragan was caught on tape saying the kind of stuff one always suspects is lurking behind such sentiments. Leaked audio had him saying he “100%” opposed a treaty with First Nations peoples (“We won this land fair and square”) and that he would cross the floor to vote to ban abortion (“I actually believe that two cells combined are actually a human. And so if murder is wrong at an adult’s stage, where do we stop with the concept of murdering a human?”).

He also said that Brad Battin, the Liberal MP for Berwick, the seat where Dragan actually lives, is a “prick”.

Coming in part two: a flurry of corruption investigations, mainstream media goes full conspiracy theory, the religious right makes a play for power, and plenty more oddball candidates.