John Miles, Adelaide’s The Advertiser, February 7, 1975, p. 5.

Dr. John Whiting, suave, smooth-talking, smartly dressed, is not everybody’s idea of a worker, though he does work hard as a general practitioner at Dulwich.

He is also foundation president of a new national political group called the Workers Party, started in Sydney two weeks ago.

His friend, Mr Peter Kentwell, was introduced to me by Dr. Whiting as provisional president of the Workers Party in SA.

Mr. Kentwell is not anyone’s popular political definition of a worker either. He is works manager of a manufacturing firm. A trained production engineer, he is 45, married with three grown-up children, and lives comfortably at Oaklands Park.

Dr. Whiting and Mr. Kentwell first got together in August, 1973, when Dr. Whiting said with much publicity that he would go to gaol rather than submit to price control of his medical fees. Mr. Kentwell admired that.

“I won that round,” Dr. Whiting told me, speaking in vowel sounds that would have won him approval of his masters at St. Peter’s College when he was a bright boy there.

“Dunstan climbed down. The prices order on me was revoked.” That was only one time he tangled with authority. In 1971 he walked out of the AMA because he refused to agree to sign the Declaration of Geneva as required. He did not agree with many of its promises.

He dislikes people who want something for nothing and governments who give it to them. The “Welfare State” provokes him to warfare.

His book, Be In It Mate, based on his early experiences as a doctor in the Repatriation Department, attacked “bludging and malingering” in the system. Ex-services organisations did not like it much.

John Whiting had done his bit in the war. He was in the middle of a law course at the University of Adelaide when it broke out. He joined the RAAF, was seconded to RAF Bomber Command, piloted Lancasters over Germany and Italy and came home with a DFC, restless.

He became a worker, if a roaming one. He worked as a deck hand, in a chocolate factory, in a garage, as a salesman and even in public relations for the glossy world of British films.

Medical life began for him at 40, relatively late. He had decided by then it was what he really wanted to do. He has relics of his service in “Lancs.” in the room of his large, old house. He look as if he would still be at home in a bomber.

His recent book, Wake Up Mate, fires a few rockets. It declares: “”Our society is a hollow sham covered by a thin veneer of self-righteous humbug.” It blasts the conditioning of people by teachers, parents, church and bosses.

Dr. Whiting’s energetic ego make him a natural enthusiast for the old-time creed of laissez-faire capitalism and freedom from Government controls which the Workers Party is really all about.

A dictionary definition of “laissez-faire” is: Government abstention from interference with individual action, especially in commerce.

Speaking with apparent personal conviction and quoting from a little black book which contains the platform and constitution of the Workers Party, Dr. Whiting and Mr. Kentwell combined to tell me that the party had sprung from the conviction of a group of like-minded men, mostly in Sydney, that our economy was headed for a crash, overloaded as it was with Government controls and doomed by inflation created by deficit financing and the artificial circulation of money based on credit.

Dr. Whiting solemnly read me what he said was the key principle of the party: “No man or group of men has the right to initiate the use of force, fraud or coercion against another man or group of men.”

Their party offered a “practical alternative to Socialism as practised and preached by the Labor and Australia Parties and as practised by the Liberal and Country Parties.”

Mr. Kentwell said: “It is said that capitalism is collapsing, but it is not capitalism that is collapsing because we have not got it. We have a mixed economy.”

He regarded taxation as legalised coercion and theft by government, no less immoral than robbery by private people.

The party wanted a “moral” social system in which a government could not take money from hard-working, productive people, by force and threats of gaol, and give that money to people who might not deserve it.

The party was against involuntary charity, as practised by social welfare, but not against voluntary charity. Taxation would eventually be reduced to a minimum and replaced by fee-in-service payments and by private firms taking over many of the present functions of government.

By a slow process of de-control, government would be whittled down to a limited authority in charge only of police, defence forces and law courts to protect the individual’s rights.

How will all this be done?

“We will start with a crash education programme for the people,” said Dr Whiting.

“In Sydney already we are getting hundreds of members to overflow meetings.”

“We will start here with key men at cell meetings here in my house. They will form groups of their own. We will spread through advertisements to public meetings.”

“I am fully prepared to stand for Parliament at the next Federal election. We will offer other candidates when finances permit.”

“This is not just another funny flash in the pan.”