EVERY election throws them up - the candidates that make you wonder "what on earth were they thinking?"
That question applies both to the wannabe politicians whose conduct embarrasses their party - and to the party that picked them in the first place.
Scarcely had 2013 begun than two candidates for Katter's Australia Party bit the dust.
Tess Corbett in Victoria told her local paper pedophile rights would be next in line for recognition after gays. Then the party's former national secretary Bernard Gaynor was out for tweeting he did not want gay people teaching his children.
Now there's Tasmanian Greens candidate Rosalie Woodruff, a champion of environmentally friendly electric cars who might have to campaign on an even more environmentally friendly bicycle after being caught drink driving.
More tend to emerge during election campaigns when the media spotlights the utterances of even the most obscure candidates.
But there are already some promising contenders, such as Sri Lankan-born Pastor Danny Nalliah.
He once blamed Victoria's deadly bushfires on the state's decriminalisation of abortion, and he's also famous for organising a prayer offensive in Canberra to combat the evil forces of witchcraft, homosexuality and abortion he said were besetting the national capital.
Australia has a rich history of the so-called candidates from hell.
Always a promising source of election eccentricity, Queensland didn't disappoint at the 2012 state poll, none more so than Cameron Caldwell, the Liberal National candidate for the Gold Coast seat of Broadwater.
Although standing on a platform of family values, it emerged he and his wife had attended a pirate-themed swingers party two years earlier.
Caldwell denied any swinging action, but party leader Campbell Newman wasn't about to have him in his government. Caldwell's political career lasted a week.
Labor wasn't left out. It disendorsed its candidate for the rural seat of Southern Downs, Peter Watson, 19, who it emerged had a long history of posting homophobic, sexist and racist comments on his blog.
This didn't help Labor. In one of the great electoral routs of recent political history, Queensland Labor went from government with 51 seats to opposition with seven, allowing the entire party to meet around a small kitchen table.
Social media is now part of the political landscape and can be a minefield.
Twitter offers boundless opportunities for people to get their message out - or say the wrong thing. Expect plenty of it in the 2013 Australian election campaign.
Already, independent candidate Jamie McIntyre, a Ferrari-driving Gold Coast entrepreneur standing against Barnaby Joyce in the seat of New England, has been accused of faking most of his claimed million Twitter followers.
Mining magnate Clive Palmer, founder of the Palmer United Party and prime ministerial aspirant, has scarcely stayed out of the headlines so far this year.
He tried to buy up the competing Katter Australia Party for $20 million, proposes building a replica of the Titanic, alleged a conspiracy between Greenpeace and the CIA and even reportedly told a Chinese business executive to "pack up all your f***ing gear and get back to China" in a dispute over royalty payments.
Another colourful Queenslander Pauline Hanson is likely to try to reclaim past glories.
As an endorsed Liberal candidate for the Queensland seat of Oxley in 1996, she advocated abolition of special government assistance for Aborigines in a newspaper article.
Tagged a racist, she was disendorsed but won as an independent in the election that brought John Howard to power. Hanson might have remained an obscure backbencher were it not for her maiden speech which warned Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asian immigration.
That catapulted her to international attention and resulted in the formation of the One Nation party.
NSW south coast Labor MP Peter Knott was Paul Keating's candidate from hell as he campaigned against John Hewson's planned GST at the 1993 election.
He steered Keating into a mate's bakery at Bomaderry during a campaign street walk. Apparently Keating even had a snappy one-liner ready for the TV cameras: "Even Marie Antoinette didn't put a GST on cake."
The shop owner took a different view, extolling opposition's GST plan. As the cameras rolled, Keating seethed.
Press gallery lore has it the famously acerbic Keating referred to Knott as "that c*** from the cake shop".
In the 2007 election, candidate from hell honours were shared evenly across a group of Liberal supporters, one the husband of Karen Chijoff, Liberal candidate for the western Sydney seat of Lindsay.
This group distributed a bogus election flyer from the non-existent Islamic Federation of Australia saying Labor supported terrorism and wanted to forgive the Bali bombers. Problem was, they were caught in the act.
Outgoing Liberal MP Jackie Kelly added to the damage by dismissing the caper as a "Chaser-style prank". Most everyone else thought it a crude attempt to harness anti-Muslim feeling against Labor. Five men were charged over the pamphlet scandal.
The incident cost the Liberal Party the seat of Lindsay and, possibly, John Howard the election.
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