“New party’s chief: Not good enough,” The West Australian,
November 3, 1975, p. 12.

John Singleton, advertising chief, is a hard man to please.

Despite the remarkable electoral debut of his new political party — the Workers’ Party — in the Greenough by-election on Saturday, he still was not satisfied.

He was disappointed that the party had not polled better and beaten at least the ALP on the primary count.

With nearly all primary votes counted, the party’s candidate — a Como dental surgeon, Mr G.S. McNeil — trails the ALP’s Mr F. Newman by 44 votes.

But Mr McNeil has gained almost 13 per cent of the valid votes cast, mostly at the expense of the Liberal and Labor Parties.

Mr Singleton, who is the managing director of a leading advertising agency, Doyle Dane and Bernbach Pty Ltd, and the national chairman of the Workers’ Party, said that the party had gone into the election as an unknown quantity with three aims.

The first was to win the seat. The second was to give its preferences to the NCP to help it win the seat if the Workers’ Party could not.

The third aim was to give the party a trial run in an election to give it greater credibility and to get a vote that would show the exercise was being understood.

“We started from scratch and if we had beaten the ALP on the primary count we would have finished with a vote, including second preferences, of about 20 to 25 per cent. That wouldn’t have been bad,” Mr Singleton said.

The party canvassed the big electorate — an unlikely target for a party founded in the Eastern States with only about 150 members in WA — thoroughly.

Mr Singleton said:

“It was done with volunteer labour. People took annual leave so that they could help. We had three or four people there all the time during the campaign. We knocked on most doors and talked to about a quarter of the electorate. We converted about half of those we interviewed.

The party did not offer anything specifically to the electorate. It asked for a protest vote against all government in its present form and a vote for a party committed to less government.

Mr Singleton, who spent the last week on the campaign trail, scoffed at suggestions made by political opponents that the Workers’ Party had spent from $30,000 to $50,000 on the campaign.

“It wouldn’t be possible,” he said. “Our spending in financial terms was peanuts. What we did spend was time and effort.”

Mr Singleton said that the party’s main aim now was the next Federal election.

The Workers’ Party had about 1700 foundation or working members, but 27,000 people had given the party financial support by buying literature about it or in other ways.