A Labor MP has been called a “knucklehead” for a stunt with a poster depicting Scott Morrison surrounded by flames.
Julian Hill has created a video to encourage young people to enrol to vote in which he holds the poster and tells viewxjmtzywers, “if you think Australia deserves a better future, if you want to wipe the smirk off this bloke’s face on election day …”
He then flips the poster around to the side that shows Mr Morrison’s head surrounded by flames and says: “If you want to burn the Morrison government, don’t delay, vote today”.
Sydney 2GB Radio host Ben Fordham accused Mr Hill of having “a very strange sense of what’s right and what’s wrong” and said Labor’s media team should “take a close look” at the video.
“Somebody should have said to him, ‘Hey, mate, we can run with the wipe the smirk off his face but let’s forget about the image showing a politician on fire’,” Mr Fordham said on Monday.
“In other parts of the world we have seen politicians who have been targeted and all sorts of awful things have happened to them. Thankfully, we don’t have that kind of thing that happens regularly in Australia and we want to keep it that way.
“And we don’t need knuckleheads like Julian Hill promoting this kind of thing.”
In the first portion of the video, Mr Hill holds one side of the poster up to the camera that shows a picture of a flame-free Prime Minister with a smile on his face.
“Here’s one way to wipe the smirk off Smirko’s face over Easter. There’s one thing this bloke is terrified of. And that’s young Australians enrolling to vote,” Mr Hill says in the clip, which he shared to his Twitter account on Saturday.
Mr Hill tells young voters why he thinks they shouldn’t support Mr Morrison and the coalition at the upcoming federal election.
“And this is a government, the Morrison government, that has attacked and neglected young people,” Mr Hill claims.
“No action on climate change; wrecking housing affordability; making education and TAFE and university harder and more expensive; wage cuts; wage theft; casualised and insecure work.”
People have until 8pm Monday to enrol, with more than 600,000 eligible voters yet to do so, according to the Australian Electoral Commission.
