The federal minister for women, Kelly O’Dwyer, is seeking a national response to stop Wicked Campers “sexist”, “offensive” and “misogynistic” branding.
With branding and slogans such as “in every princess there is a little slut that wants to try it just once”, “the best thing about oral sex – 5 minutes of silence” and “life sucks if your girlfriend doesn’t”, Wicked Campers often comes under fire from women and families who don’t enjoy sharing the road with such vulgarity.
O’Dwyer has written to state and territory ministers urging them to support her stance and create a unified national approach to force Wicked Campers to comply with community standards.
Wicked Campers has so far managed to keep its cars on the road because the company owns the vehicles the ads are displayed on.
And, with no third party media provider Ad Standards can work with, the existing legislation has allowed Wicked Campers to dodge Ad Standards’ Community Panel’s determination to remove the offensive advertising on its vehicles.
Recently, Queensland and Tasmania have introduced legislation specifically targeting Wicked Campers, which gives power to motor vehicle registries to deregister any vehicle that doesn’t comply with Ad Standards determinations.
Yet without uniform law across the nation, Wicked Campers has been able to avoid compliance by changing the registration of its vehicles to another state.
Deputy prime minister and minister for transport, infrastructure and regional development Michael McCormack is working on regulatory reforms through the Transport and Infrastructure Council (TIC) forum of state, territory and federal ministers.
