A short note appended to the end of Richard Hall’s regular column in The Bulletin, December 27, 1975 – January 3, 1976, p. 18.

One consoling feature of the election was the derisory vote pulled by the Workers Party candidates.

Despite the expenditure of a great deal of money, certainly in Sydney, on an expensive television advertisement, the Workers Party vote remained laughably low.

Its failure does have a significance beyond the effect on the egos of its founders.

A significant vote for the Workers Party would have been a factor in pushing Liberals further to the right. By rejecting the Workers Party, the Australian voters have made it clear that they do favour government involvement in the direction of the economy and that they will not be deluded by panaceas.

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Mike Stanton, “Hall and the WP,” The Bulletin, January 24, 1976, pp. 4-5, as a letter to the editor.

As a member of the Workers Party I value Richard Hall’s remarks about us, because they illustrate nicely the plausible nonsense that illogical socialist thinking can produce.

As an “unsuccessful” Workers Party Senate candidate, I was intrigued that Mr Hall labelled the WP vote “derisory”. If Mr Hall even accumulates enough courage or nous to form his own party, apparently it will poll magnificently immediately. The Workers Party is, after all, less than a year old and polled creditably in a difficult election, gaining more votes than both the Australia Party and the DLP.

Mr Hall does err repeatedly, however, in describing the WP as “right-wing.” I assume either that his ignominy as a failed ALP candidate forces him to misrepresent other parties or that he has no basic theoretical political knowledge. Par for the course among the “mediocrats”!

The Workers Party platform consistently applies the principle of individual sovereignty to all fields of human activity, in contrast to the erosion of rights consistently proposed and inexorably practised by all other political parties, be they left or right wing.

In terms of political spectra, then, the WP cannot be placed on the customarily described horizontal plane and perhaps would best be described as “up-wing”.

I suppose if Mr Hall forsook his headlong flight among the socialist flats and tried instead the arduous liberty steeplechase, we might lose his propaganda column and be obliged to follow contemporary socialist thought by reading the National Times or even, perish the thought, by attending Labor Party gatherings.

So, write on Mr Hall, and at least we know the idiocies we face!

MIKE STANTON
Tasmanian State Secretary WP

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Judith M. James, “The WP and Hall,” The Bulletin, January 24, 1976, p. 5, as a letter to the editor.

I am not surprised that Richard Hall finds consolation in his own interpretation of the vote polled by the Workers Party. In keeping with most of his altruistic ilk, he finds solace in derisory remarks about facts which he finds unpalatable.

Although the final figures for the recent Federal elections have not been published, the facts are these:

  1. In view of the polarisation of the vote, it is surprising that the Workers Party polled as well as it did.
  2. The Workers Party outpolled almost all other minority parties in those House of Representatives electorates where Workers Party candidates stood.
  3. In the NSW Senate, only the Workers Party and the SWL gained votes (the SWL had the donkey vote, and its members will no doubt spend the next three years trying to find all those Trotskyites who are just sitting around waiting for the revolution). All other previously existing minority parties lost support.
  4. The Workers Party, which has never before contested a Federal election (but which gained almost 14 percent of the vote in its first State by-election, Greenough, WA) gained votes in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
  5. I have no knowledge of exactly how much money was spent on Workers Party advertising, but I do know that all the money was given voluntarily.
  6. The “failure” Mr Hall talks about is, in fact, a success, a small success, perhaps, but by no stretch of the imagination (even Mr Hall’s rather ripe one) could it be called “laughable”.

What is laughable is Mr Hall’s attempt once again to put across his socialist point of view in the manner which all Bulletin readers have become accustomed, by using distortion of obvious facts, derisory remarks, in his case, about the egos of the WP founders and by inflating his own ego to the point where he believes he is right.

He isn’t. He’s wrong. Again!

JUDITH M. JAMES
Mangerton NSW