The Victorian Liberal Party Has Somehow Managed To Piss Off Fans Of Cage Fighting

The Victorian state election is this Saturday, and at the moment it’s looking like the Napthine Liberal government is going to have its Napthine Liberal butt handed to it and get booted out after only one term in office. The reasons for that are manifold, from the controversial East-West Link road plan to Tony Abbott’s scrofulous aura infecting anything with the word “Liberal” in it to the point that state Liberals begged him to not campaign for them.

The Liberals aren’t dealing with the looming prospect of defeat very well, and have started dipping into the grab-bag of Scary Election Slogans; typical stuff like “Labor Are Soft On Crime“, “Labor Are In Bed With The Unions“, and “Labor Will Turn Victoria Into A Giant Cage Fighting Ring“.

That last one? Not a joke. Not even remotely a joke. About six hours ago, the Victorian Liberal Party posted this on their Facebook page.

“DON’T SUPPORT LABOR’S CAGE FIGHTING STATE“. That’s how you connect with voters, right there. All it needs is a Photoshopped image of Daniel Andrews in colourful spandex beating a working family over the head with a chair.

Some context: Victoria Labor is, in fact, promising to lift a ban on cage fighting should it win on Saturday. The Liberals and state Police Chief Commissioner Ken Lay oppose lifting the ban, with Lay claiming doing so would “glamorise extreme violence”, and someone clearly thought they were onto a winner with this little number implying that Melbourne will become one giant Hunger Games arena if Labor gets up.

If the prospect of legalised cage fighting gets you and all your Country Women’s Association associates in a tizz, though, it’s worth taking a second to clarify what “cage fighting” actually is; namely, a form of mixed martial arts, or MMA, that takes place inside a cage as opposed to an open ring. MMA is completely legal in Victoria — it’s a highly regulated, professional sport practiced all over the world — but in Victoria there’s a rule specifically banning MMA fights inside a cage, a restriction brought in by the then-Labor state government in 2008.

Since then, though, Labor has had a change of heart — maybe because MMA matches in open rings are actually less safe for contestants than bouts in cages, but more likely because the ban has seen the UFC, MMA’s premiere promotion company, take their bouts elsewhere, along with the buckets of money that come with them.

Hence why the Liberals are running completely sane and not-unhinged-at-all ads like this one:

“Is this what you want, you fucking monster? To see our beautiful state turned into Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? That movie aged really well, but that isn’t the point!”

Unfortunately for the Liberals, MMA has quite a large number of fans in Victoria, every single one of whom seem to be on the Libs’ Facebook page giving them an almighty serve at the moment.

They’ve even attracted the ire of Vic “The Spartan” Grujic, a Melbourne-based MMA fighter who’s been campaigning pretty vigorously online to convince MMA fans to vote Labor.

Grujic, incidentally, looks like this:

I know very little of Vic “The Spartan” Grujic, or MMA in general. Vic “The Spartan” Grujic is probably a very nice man. That said, I would not go out of my way to antagonise someone named Vic “The Spartan” Grujic, especially if that someone is so good at beating people up he can make a career out of it.

Whether or not the Victorian Liberals lose power on Saturday, if I were Denis Napthine I would hit the gym in anticipation of being challenged to an open-air fighting bout by a man who looks like he could rip a phonebook in half.

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Feature image via Martin Rhodes on a Flickr Creative Commons licence.