This one is… look, it’s weird.
Vandalism of election materials is fairly part-and-parcel of any election campaign, it should be said. Any excuse to wrap a sharpie ’round a pollies’ face is one that’s gleefully taken up time and time again.
Normally, not much becomes of it. Politicians have the budget to replace these things fairly regularly, after all. It becomes a constant carousel of put up/deface/replace.
Andrew Hastie, who you might remember as Tony Abbott‘s personal select in the Western Australian seat of Canning, has taken a different approach.
When a billboard (for lack of a better term, as it’s realistically a large banner attached to a shipping container placed on the side of a road) in his electorate got defaced, Hastie apparently decided to take matters into his own hands.
It’s probably fair to suggest that that banner cost a fair whack of money to print up, and as such outright replacing it would’ve been unrealistic.
So instead of doing that, Hastie instead paid local graffiti artist Adam Garland $400 to help him steer into the skid by uh… painting Hastie with a mullet?
That, apparently, is how it’s done mate.
Hastie, speaking to the ABC, stated that the mullet portrait was a tribute to his own electorate and the colourful characters that live there.
“I’ve seen some very fine mullets in Canning and certainly it’s a shout-out to the quality of mullets in this area.”
“It’s been a long campaign … we all need a laugh. Hopefully this gives people a bit of welcome relief from federal politics.”“It was better than leaving an ugly tag sitting over the top of my face.”
Welp. You know what they say: Business in the front, political party in the back.
Source: ABC News.
Photo: Andrew Hastie/Facebook.
