Graham Williams, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 1976, p. 8.

The Workers Party — the anarchists of the Right Wing — is now revamping its libertarian ideology in a desperate bid to become the only significant minority party.

With the DLP and the Australia Party in their death throes, the party is gearing up for the NSW elections which will decide if there is any room for its radical right-wing ideology.

Its policy of handing all Government activity, barring defence, courts and police, to private enterprise derives from Ayn Rand, the US hot-gospeller of ultra-capitalism whom Malcolm Fraser admires.

But it alienates traditional conservatives and charms the New Left with its policies of decriminalising drug use, prostitution, abortion and pornography.

All this is part of its policy of complete individual freedom. As party member Merilyn Geisakam puts it, “Love of freedom is an honourable love.”

Freedom is so precious that, like the Australian League of Rights the Workers Party is anti-flouridation, but, unlike most conservatives, anti-conscription, too.

The year-old party has only 1,700 members, yet it was able to lavish $200,000 on its baptism of fire at the December Federal election.

The result was poor. Its NSW Senate team, led by the polo-playing grazier Sinclair Hill, scored only 28,000 primary votes, against the Family Action Movement’s 44,500 and the DLP’s 44,400.

But the party has solid business backing and is now compiling comprehensive policy statements on transport, primary production, mining and welfare for the election campaign.

“We’re on the way up while the DLP and the other minority parties are on the way down,” says the party chairman, the aggressive advertising man John Singleton.

And the party secretary, Bob Howard, claims: “We’re the only party, except for the Communist Party, that has a truly ideological base. We have a good chance of becoming a significant party.”

But, given recent big swings to the Liberal-CP juggernaut and the sharp decline of minority parties in the Federal and Victorian polls, just how much room for a maverick extremist party such as this?

Professor Henry Mayer, Professor of Government at Sydney University, believes the party “should not be written off yet,” and that it could gain a reasonable base of support.

“They’re anarchists of the Right in their desire to return to a world of complete free enterprise. This could find support with disenchanted Liberals as the Fraser Government finds it cannot pull out of Big Government,” he says.

“At the same time their socio-cultural libertarianism is attractive to the New Left with its pro-drugs, pro-abortion, anti-censorship and anti-conscription attitudes.”

The party’s radical permissiveness on socio-cultural issues, which shocks the Maoist puritans as much as it does the traditional moralistic conservatives, has opened up tensions within the party.

The older conservatives want to water down these policies, while the younger libertarians reply that to do so would destroy the party’s entire base.

Mr Howard, 27, a mechanical engineer, estimates that only 5 per cent of members are “educated libertarians,” but three schools have been set up in Sydney to educate people in libertarianism.

“If the libertarians get outnumbered by the conservatives in the party, it could lose some of its consistency,” he warns in the journal, Free Enterprise, edited and published by Merilyn Giesekam.

The latest issue of the eight-page journal carries many cutting comments about party chiefs and strategy that highlight growing conflicts in the party.

In a profile of people in power in the party, it says of Mr Singleton, 33, the chairman of Doyle, Dayne and Bernbach, the advertising agency.

“He is without doubt the most powerful man in the party today, and as such, has almost dictatorial control if he wishes to exercise it.

“A great fan of Sir Robert Askin, the former Premier of NSW, John Singleton’s personal philosophy seems to be a mixture of ultraconservatism admixed with an increasing measure of libertarianism and ockerish hedonism.”

Bob Howard (who works full-time as secretary without pay, which is a sore point with him), is described as the party’s best speaker on ideology, but with his non-aggressive manner he is like “a round peg trying to fit into a square hole,” in the party.

Sinclair Hill agreed to stand on the party’s Senate team “after two days of hard sell by John Singleton” without much knowing much about the party’s platform or philosophy, it says.

“While he certainly stuck his neck out more than most during the election, he certainly put his foot in his mouth a few times … He doesn’t believe too much in the platform, eg, civil liberties such as drug use, but he may become radicalised.”

Marketing Strategy

Other key figures named are Duncan Yuille, former secretary of the GP’s Society and Mark Tier, an economist (“both committed libertarians”). Omitted, however, are the publisher Maxwell Newton, who is elsewhere criticised for making “unfortunate remarks,” and the wealthy Queensland grazier Charles Russell.

Tier, in an article, claims the party lacks strategy, tactics and knowledge, and places the blame for the bad marketing of the party partly at the door of John Singleton.

What is needed is “a marketing strategy,” he says and considers it “strange that John Singleton, without doubt one of the world’s top advertising and marketing men, has not sat down and treated the WP like a product and tried to figure out such a plan.”

“The trouble is that John really believes in the WP … He has lost his initial detachment (he originally planned to stay in the background) and became really involved, and I think … quite idealistic about the party’s goals.”

Indeed, Mr Singleton, the portly, sandy-haired and tanned millionaire whose ockerish ads swamp TV screens these days, transmits his idealism as he talks rapid-fire conviction in his office, a former terraced cottage near Taylor Place.

“We ultimately want to cut out all unnecessary government because it’s inefficient and its suppresses human freedom,” he says, in what could be a direct quote from Ayn Rand.

“The first thing we’d dismantle is Medibank and get back to private health care. That would chop $1,600 million off the deficit.”

But education would also go private, and private operators would be able to compete with the railways by leasing trains and railway lines, and with the Post Office. Ultimately even water supplies and electricity would go private.

He strongly defends the party’s permissive attitudes on drugs, abortion, censorship and other human “freedoms.”

“You can’t legislate to stop people taking drugs or having abortions or reading dirty comics. I’m as much in favour of the family as the Festival of Light, but you can’t legislate to make people believe in it.”

“Licence for 9 chooks”

He holds no joy for the farmers — all subsidies (and tariffs) would go in the interests of returning to a completely free market and healthy competition.

He says Government intervention has almost “fouled-up” primary industry. He cites the absurdly high, controlled cost of milk, bread and eggs (“it’s criminal that the inefficient are protected are protected and anyone who wants more than nine chooks has to get a licence”).

The party is now seriously considering a name change (its name backfired when many voters thought it connoted a fascist, totalitarian party), but party chiefs say the main problem is that its ideology has been misrepresented in the press.

“It’s so logical, so beautiful — we stand for complete individual freedom — that when people get the message they will support us,” says Mr Howard.

But will people get the massage? So far the party’s members comprise mainly self-made men — doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

Ayn Rand on capitalism

“We are radicals for capitalism, fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish,” writes Ayn Rand.

Miss Rand, high-priestess and dogmatist of the new total laissez-faire ideology which is the driving force of the Workers Party, is a highly successful US writer.

Famous for her books, Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness, she preaches that any form of collectivism or State control is anti-life because it enslaves man.

“The only function of Government in (a truly) capitalist society is the task of protecting man’s rights — of protecting him from physical force,” she says in her book Capitalism.

“Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the Government is fast becoming its most dangerous violator … We are fast approaching the stage where the Government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens can act only by permission.”

“This is the stage of the darkest period of human history, the stage of rule by force.”

Again: “Capitalism is incompatible with the morality of altruism … Capitalism was destroyed by the morality of altruism.”

“Capitalism is based on individual rights — not on the sacrifice of the individual to the ‘public good’ of the collective …”

“The only choice is freedom or dictatorship, capitalism or statism (state control). The ‘liberals’ are trying to put statism over by stealth — statism of a semi-socialist, semi-fascist kind …”

“The social system based on the altruist morality — with the code of self-sacrifice — is socialism in all its variants: fascism, Nazism and communism.”

“All treat man as a sacrificial animal, to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the society, the State.”

There is no such thing as a man’s right to a job, a right to a fair wage, or “rights of consumers” just as farmers and businessmen have no rights to subsidies, tariffs or other protection, she says.

“In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to co-operate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their judgments, convictions and interests dictate.”