Janet Hawley, “Bludgers need not apply,”
The Australian, November 29, 1975, p. 27.

Adman John Singleton gives Janet Hawley a glimpse at the workings of the Workers Party, the latest of his many creations.

“This country need to get back its guts and balls, and the Workers Party will do it,” maverick advertising man and WP chairman, John Singleton, tells a fired-up $12 a plate lunch at the Boulevarde Hotel in Sydney, and 140 sets of teeth chomp into the strawberry mousse.

He strides out of the lunch, the golden-haired Atlas of the reborn Australia in many of the eaters’ eyes, and heaves his splendidly suited limbs into a car with Sinclair Hill, the wealthy farmer who plays polo with Prince Philip. “It’s an image I’m trying to bloody well chuck — I’ve played polo with the duke for nine hours out of my life,” mutters Sinclair, number one on the Workers Party Senate ticket.

They hurtle off to the airport with model Maggie Eckhardt, shearer Graham Hooper, Sinclair’s son Noel, nurse-cum-secretary Jan Benfer and the press in tow, and fly a hired plane to Wagga to do some campaigning.

The plan was to use Sinclair’s private plane, but it’s only a four-seater Mooney, and Wagga is a big deal because of the by-election. After Wagga, Sinclair will be flying his own plane around NSW campaigning, and Lang Hancock will be flying his plane around campaigning in the Northern Territory.

“Lang is a supporter, but he still won’t join us … I’ve even offered to lend him the $50 but he reckons he’s too busy with the secession movement,” chuckles Singleton.

The Workers Party launched at a lunch at the Opera House on Australia Day this year, and immediately denounced in heavy terms — lunatic fringe splinter party, bizarre revival of 18th-century conservatism, selfish fascists, right-wing Hitlers, and the rest — is now 11 months old and thriving. So Mickey Mouse to you, to use one of Singleton’s pet throwaway lines.

The party now has 3000 $50 foundation members, 30,000 supporters who have paid $5 upwards (numerous doctors, lawyers, businessmen and graziers), and the party faithful have contributed $250,000 to date which has all be spent on advertising and printing. The party is standing Senate and House of Reps candidates in all States except Victoria, and running a TV advertising campaign ($950 for 60 sec airtime) starring your earnest bushie, Sinclair (“I may be just a farmer but”) Hill.

“More members and more sugar will flow in like an avalanche darlin’, now we’re really getting cracking,” Sinclair yells like a warcry over the aircraft throttle. What Sinclair calls sugar, Singleton calls brass, and, yes, he’s amazed at how he is able to persuade people t0 arty with money for the party.

NO INTEREST IN NO-HOPERS

The Workers Party met a rather hostile initial reaction when Dr John Whiting (author of Be In It Mate) declared the party was not interested in “human leeches, parasites, no-hopers and bludgers.”

Since then, like a good adman, Singleton has analysed the feedback and played down the parasite language, though bludger is still prominent in WP jargon, and always mentions that the party does care about the aged and incapacitated too — it’s not just a party for the successful.

“The Workers Party stands for less government, less tax, less inflation and more freedom,” says Singleton. “The average Australian works two days out of three for the government.”

“I’ve always believed that Australians are basically good people, willing to work and stand on their own two feet, but people need pride from a sense of achievement.”

“Today kids grow up hearing their father moaning that the boss is a rotten, mean bludger, the kid goes to school and it’s free, he goes to university and it’s free, he gets sick and medical care is free, so he grows up thinking the world owes him a living. He has no incentive to look after himself.”

“In three years this socialist Government has turned Australia from the greatest country in the world to a country riddled with class hatred. What is class? Class is ‘them’ versus ‘us’. The bosses versus the unions.”

“Australia is being ruined by socialists, who are bums. We would abolish government welfare and get back the friendly ways of old country towns where neighbours cared about each other. There was always a village idiot, but the village looked after him and didn’t lock him up. If someone was sick Aunty Flo made them soup and did their washing …”

Yes, but what about the other side of village life in the good old days, the rich and powerful landlords and the downtrodden serfs? “Oh that’s a load of bullshit. Serfs gave one-quarter of their crop to the landlord. We give two-thirds to the Government today. If we all fight hard, we might be as well off as the serfs.”

To save Australia, the Workers Party platform would abolish Medibank, the PJT, Federal departments of the Media, Urban and Regional Development, Tourism and Recreation, Minerals and Energy, sell the ABC to private enterprise, let the dollar float, abolish sales tax and provisional tax and reduce income tax. “Taxation is theft.

All tariffs and subsidies would be abolished, free education reduced, government welfare schemes reduced and replaced by private charities, the public service and the diplomatic corps drastically cut. The law of supply and demand and private enterprise would reign supreme and eventually solve all.

“The only thing the Government needs to do for us that we can’t do for ourselves are to look after defence, law courts and police. We’d change the attitude of the present criminal code, so the criminal works to pay back the victim of his crime, instead of being kept in free lodgings by the State.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Singleton wants Australia to remain a monarchy, despite the vast cost of keeping up the vice-regal jamboree, “because I like a bit of tradition.”

The Workers Party was a strange by-product that arose from Singleton’s notorious anti-Labor TV ads for the last Federal election. Singles, as he’s known in the trade, already famous for his Norman Ross, etc, ocker ads, brought such hostility upon himself that much of the nation secretly cheered when his private Rolls-Royce was blown up amid the campaign. (As it turned out the felon had no politics and just wanted to strip a swank car, but crossed the wrong wires.)

Did he learn anything from that campaign? “Yes, never to advertise a product that doesn’t exist,” Singleton answers rapidly. “Those ads were anti-Labor, but not pro-Liberal. So what was the alternative? People would ring me and talk politics and I thought, well, we could get into the Liberal Party and try to reform it, but it’s rotten from the top down, so that’s for the birds. Why not start a new party of our own?”

About that time I was reading Bob Howard’s Free Enterprise newsletter and I thought he was saying a lot of good things so I rang him up and told him so. Bob told me I should read Mark Tier, the free-market economist, so I did too. I met Mark and he was talking to Dr Duncan Yuille, who was then president of the General Practitioners Society and fighting Medibank, and he knew Dr John Whiting and we all met Max Newton.

“In July we met in my office, set ourselves a deadline to launch the Workers Party on Australia Day, and we did it.”

The terrace house premises of the advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, of which Singleton is managing director, are in the former city brothel territory of Squizzy Taylor Square. Singleton’s office upstairs is the interesting man’s office straight out of Vogue Living. There are potter rubber trees, umbrella trees, palms, baskets of hanging vines, the round table with floor-length cloth. The visitor sits in a (symbolic?) old wooden invalid’s chair and Singles sits in a nouveau swivel chair, with the latest picture of Maggie pinned on the cork board, and a dozen canaries in bamboo cages at the other end of the desk peck at sliced apple and cuttlefish. Some errant snails have sketched silvery trails all over the brown-velvet wallpaper.

In this greenhouse atmosphere, witnessed only by the canaries, every second Tuesday night for six months, the Workers Party hatched itself.

The Workers Party credo, which is printed just about everywhere, is, “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.” Its platform abounds with Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged … “I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”).

“I haven’t even read Ayn Rand, though a lot of the party founders are deeply into her writings,” says Singleton. “I tried to read Atlas Shrugged and gave up after 80 pages. I’m not a reader. I just go by commonsense. All I know is nobody gets nothing for nothing in this world.

“Our platform is very idealistic. We’ll work toward it being implemented in our lifetime, but we’ll only see the start.”

“DOBELL WILL PAINT MORE”

So here we are in Wagga after a two-hour buck-jumping flight, Sinclair yelling yahoo at every air pocket and shearer Graham re-telling every woolshed joke. A crowd of 11 is waiting at Wagga Airport, but 200 more turn up at the RSL club that night.

Sinclair, who seemed to be straining at the bit with all the mucking around in the city is in his element in Wagga, though he still appears slightly awkward bleeping out his usual flow of bloodies etc. (Singleton told him to.)

“Many of my conservative Country Party friends are rather shocked at me, they reckon Sinclair has gone mad joining the Workers Party,” he says. “But I reckon underneath they all want to come out and join me.”

How will the farmers go with no subsidies? “Better,” responds Sinclair. “Subsidies have ruined the farmers’ pride and dignity. Take away the politics and the subsidies and tariffs and restrictions and we’ll farm better than ever.”

“We’re offering every man a chance to bloom. Dobell will paint more and Helpmann will dance more out of sheer inspiration.”

Singleton, 33, who grew up in the working-class suburb of Dulwich Hill understanding your real earthy Ockers, the bright kid with the high IQ who was chosen for opportunity school and had the virtues of ambition and hard work drummed into him by his parents, is equally in command in the RSL or the Boulevarde. He soon has his audiences chortling as he glibly harangues and satirises the Labor and Liberal Party geniuses.

“Well, there’s Hayden, who talks in a high-pitched voice as he steals your money, but he patted a dog on the front page this week, so he’s all right.”

“Frank Crean, gawd, can’t you just see the dandruff falling. Reminds you of some fat old uncle who smelt a bit and you didn’t want to kiss as you gave him his Christmas present … bermuda sox are always handy …”

“Whitlam, well he goes off to Washington and at least he’s a bit articulate, but Snedden, God! Australia’s just failed the reading test!”

Back to Sydney and Singleton has to carry on his own business as well as the WP business. There’s his first meeting with the Department of the Media offshoot, the Australian Government Advertising Advisory Service. Singleton submits his name every year and this year, to his shock and astonishment, he was appointed.

Singleton announces he’s locked his Rolls (Mk II) in a garage for three weeks and all his mail is being X-rayed too and the policemen have a few beers and wander on their way.

Mark Tier wanders in talking to a businessman who’s arrived to offer his services to the party, “because Australia is full of bludgers.”

“Well,” nods Tier, “people who’ve been getting an easy ride off the rest of us aren’t going to like the Workers Party. The bums getting their crust out of the real workers won’t like us. There are some people you have to look after, but there are too many bludgers. But the more you tax people, the less people will work. Half the people in the Public Service shouldn’t be there, they should be out producing things. The Public Service isn’t organised to do a job — it’s organised to give people jobs.

Singleton says: “We got 13.5 per cent of the vote in our first election, the State by-election in Greenough in Western Australia in November, and we’ll keep it up.”

“The Workers Party has arrived, bloody ripper mate,” he cries, whacking the desk and sending the canaries scattering.