Anonymous “People” column, The Bulletin, July 12, 1975, p. 30.

The aging enfant terrible of Australia’s publishing world, Maxwell Newton, has formalised his dramatic change in taste in politics. He has become a director and national spokesman on economic and political issues for the ultra-right Workers Party.

Newton, 46, who publishes the Sunday Observer in Melbourne as well as some sexy papers and comic books, played a key role in the compilation of Arthur Calwell’s policy speech for the ALP in 1961, while managing editor of the Financial Review.

Newton has now developed one of the most aggressive and outspoken, if exaggerated, styles around. This is a sample of his brand of oratory from a recent speech:

Led by the silver-tongued mountebank Whitlam with an army of charlatans and quacks behind him, we are seeing the destruction of the foundations of economic growth in our country and we are seeing its possibilities of great wealth being frittered away in an appalling display of profligate government spending whose sole significant result will turn out to have been to throttle economic growth and to put man against man, brother against brother, in an unseemly and disgusting rush for more and more gluttony at the trough of public funds.

Future statements from the Workers Party promise to be more colourful, at least.