Caught on camera: Signs torn down and turfed in council poster wars

Welcome to Ward Games, The Age’s coverage of the weird, wacky and (sometimes) wonderful world of Victoria’s local council elections.

We’ll be publishing regular columns in the lead-up to voting closing on October 25, focusing on the colourful characters and unusual goings-on we will see over the next few weeks.

Ballots are in the mail – don’t forget to send in your vote or you’ll be getting a $99 surprise from the Victorian Electoral Commission (not in a good way). Good luck to voters in Wyndham City, in Melbourne’s west, where there are more than 90 candidates to choose from.

While you’re doing that, send your tips and sightings to [e-mail] and [e-mail]. No fines will be issued, but we encourage everyone to take part. Now, to the column.

SIGN WARS

Messing with a candidate’s corflutes – those big posters with people’s faces on them – is a major no-no, but stories abound at every election of these signs going missing or being defaced.

Typically, these shenanigans happen under the cloak of darkness. But not in the City of Kingston, south-east of Melbourne, where a person was filmed tearing down corflutes in broad daylight.

The signs belong to sitting councillor Georgina Oxley, who posted on Facebook about the alleged thefts, as well as vandalism that included moustaches, devil ears and blackened teeth. Classy.

The Age has obtained a copy of the footage, which shows the alleged culprit defacing the signs, then tossing them over a fence onto the train line between Chelsea and Edithvale stations.

Speculation is rife over the person’s identity but, for now, we’ll let readers decide. (We think they look a little like Will Arnett’s character, Gob, in Arrested Development throwing a letter into the sea.)

We’re told the footage was recorded by a resident on Saturday afternoon in Foy Avenue, Chelsea. It was then sent to Oxley and her husband, David Eden, who is also on the council.

They’re clearly not impressed.

A photo of a defaced corflute belonging to Georgina Oxley, a sitting councillor in the City of Kingston.

“Local council is about leadership within our community,” Oxley told us.

“Trashing, vandalising and engaging in hateful conduct has no place in our community. Proceeding to throw large signs directly onto a train line is irresponsible, reckless and could put lives at risk.”

An official complaint was made to Victoria Police, who said officers were investigating.

A corflute for Kingston Council candidate David Eden in Mordialloc.Credit: KingstonCitizen

“Officers have been told a male damaged a number of campaign election signs along the Nepean Highway,” a police spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, adding to the Kingston sign wars was an anonymous emailer known only as “KingstonCitizen”.

The deep throat, using an untraceable Proton email address, took issue with Oxley and Eden placing signs along train station fences and on council land without permits.

(Doing so is not allowed under both council and Metro rules, although you’ll see fairly lax enforcement during election season.)

The Age was included on a mass email chain dragging in journalists, councillors, council staff and the local government minister, making them aware of a laundry list of supposed illegal sign locations.

Rival independent (and former Liberal Party member) candidate Jane Agirtan also jumped in, hitting reply all to include her two cents. Among her grievances were that signs had “come loose and are lying on train tracks and in parks and playgrounds”. We wonder how they got there.

For what it’s worth, we hear an Airtasker put up some corflutes. Eden told The Age the third party was asked to install them in “safe and suitable locations”.

Kingston’s media team advised us late on Tuesday that offending corflutes were already being removed, and a whopping seven candidates had been given warnings.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL

The VEC sent out ballots this week that are expected to arrive in letterboxes in coming days.

Apparently Australia Post works quickly in Melbourne’s northern suburbs – or so it seemed when one Coburg resident received an official-looking package by mail on Monday.

On the the envelope sent to one Merri-bek voter were the words: “Important Information for Council Elections”, along with a long barcode. Seems pretty serious!

Hassaan Gul’s voter mailout how-to-vote card and the envelope it arrived in.

Rachel, who declined to use her surname due to her profession, told The Age she initially thought she’d received her VEC ballot.

When she opened it, she found a how-to-vote card for Labor-endorsed candidate Hassaan Gul, in the Bababi Djinanang ward covering Fawkner and Coburg.

“Nowhere on the envelope does it say Labor, that indicates it’s promotional material,” Rachel said. “To me, it came across as a VEC envelope, which is a bit of a worry.”

Would you mistake this envelope as coming from the Victorian Electoral Commission?

The Age was tipped off to this nifty piece of electoral material by rival candidate and sitting councillor Sue Bolton, who lodged a formal complaint with the VEC.

The Socialist Alliance veteran was outraged, blasting out a press release referring to herself in the third person (not unusual in council elections where media managers cost money).

“The envelope is designed to take advantage of voters who might ... think that the VEC endorses the candidate,” Bolton said.

“It is doubly misleading because the official-looking envelope with ALP voting material inside was timed to arrive at approximately the same time as the ballot papers from the VEC.”

But Gul, a community activist and first-time council candidate, told The Age it was a beat-up by Bolton: plenty of candidates used such envelopes, and the snazzy design was widely available from printing services.

“It’s not misleading. When you open it, it’s clearly about me and not from the VEC,” he said. “Even the QR code [on the envelope] will mention my contact details on there.”

Gul said he used envelopes when letter boxing because residents were more likely to take the envelope inside and not treat it as junk mail.

“I’ve found so many pamphlets around on the ground as litter,” he said.

We’ve asked the Local Government Inspectorate (responsible for investigating alleged breaches) whether the envelopes would be considered “misleading and deceptive material”.

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