The Logan election campaign has been dubbed by one long-time councillor “as the dirtiest he’s ever experienced”

THE Logan council election is ramping up with one long-time councillor dubbing it the “dirtiest” campaign he had been involved in.

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THE Logan election campaign has been dubbed by one long-time councillor “as the dirtiest he’s ever experienced”.

Cr Darren Power (Div 10) said he had gone through eight elections and had never experienced such a dirty campaign.

As well as defacing, damaging and stealing of elections signs, there have been claims of threats against new candidates and claims of harassment between sitting councillors.

One mayoral candidate is believed to have lost about 400 signs.

Last week, mayoral candidate Luke Smith claimed in the media that Cr Lisa Bradley (Div 1) had harassed some of his supporters.

In reply, Cr Bradley alleged Cr Smith’s claim followed her decision to advise police about alleged threatening behaviour against her by some of Cr Smith’s supporters.

There is no suggestion Cr Smith was responsible for the alleged conduct by those supporters.

Division 11 candidate Kelly Cousins said she also contemplated withdrawing from the campaign because of alleged threats to ruin her reputation and destroy her business.

Griffith University’s political expert Professor Paul Williams said a “dirty tricks” campaign was definitely unusual and regrettable

“Australian campaigns, by and large, are very clean by world standard and it’s shocking that these sorts of things were occurring,” Prof Williams said.

“And I would hope that police and the (Queensland) electoral commission are taking a very close look at these allegations.”

Prof Williams said the odd sign being vandalised was pretty much par for the course in a campaign.

“But when it comes to physical threats that’s in a different territory altogether,” he said.

The seasoned commentator said this behaviour was more likely in an environment where there were no party machines running the show.

“Most party machines...tend to run well-oiled campaigns. By and large, they use dirty rhetoric, but they don’t use dirty tactics...but they don’t want the media to focus on that (dirty tactics) and lose valuable campaign oxygen,” he said.

Mayoral candidate Ken Houliston said he had heard a lot of “stuff”, but was not sure what was true.

At this week’s council meeting — the last before the election on March 19 — Cr Phil Pidgeon (Div 9) said he had ordered another 300 election signs for the last few weeks of the campaign because 50 of his signs were stolen overnight on Monday.

“Of all my terms in council, this would have to be the grubbiest, dirtiest campaign I’ve ever seen from some people, it’s disgraceful,” he said.

Mayoral contender John Freeman felt this campaign was not as bad as the one in 2008 when his supporters were threatened.

A spokesperson for Cr Smith said Cr Smith did not want to comment on claims about whether this was a “dirty campaign” as “he has more important things to focus on for Logan”.