John Singleton, “Singo returns the slings and arrows,”
Times on Sunday, August 2, 1987, p. 16.

With the Federal election out of the way, JOHN SINGLETON responds to those who criticised the way in which he handled the Labor Party’s advertising.

Initially, Senator Graham Richardson approached me through Rene Rivkin to see if I would handle the Hawke re-election campaign.

For starters, both Rene Rivkin and I knew we were on a hiding to nothing. If Labor won the day the advertising would have played an irrelevant role. If Labor was beaten the advertising would have been the single most damaging factor.

On the other hand it was the most important job in the country.

I believed that the return of the Hawke-Keating Government was essential to Australia’s short and long-term competitiveness.

On the other hand, a re-election of the Liberal/National rabble at this stage would have had devastating effects.

There really was no decision but to take the risk and do the right thing no matter what the cost.

After all, neither Rene nor I have ever hidden the fact that we could actually struggle through even if all our clients left us overnight; which at about 7.30 on election night seemed a real good possibility.

Anyone who has studied democratic politics in Australia, or the world for that matter, knows you can’t retain office in an economic downturn. On the precedents, a Labor victory was just about impossible! The ANOP polls showed it.

Even Britain’s greatest hero, Winston Churchill, couldn’t pull it off.

But the Hawke-Keating team headed up by Federal boss Bob McMullan and world champion researcher Rod Cameron did pull off the impossible, with a little bit of help from the most viciously criticised advertising ever used in an election campaign.

Well, it’s over and the results of the Labor campaign are obvious in the only poll that really matters.

Now is the time to reflect on the opinions of those who, during the campaign, took the chance to take cheap shots at me while I was in no position to defend myself.

1) Leo Schofield: Leo was kind enough to say that he still had “chilling” memories of a campaign I had run some 12 years ago. That was flattering really because I cannot remember even one campaign Leo has ever been responsible for.

My memories of Leo are limited to his ramblings about food and grog as some kind of religious experience. And along with his giggling interference with anything that even has a whiff of progress.

Leo sits in his chromium-plated office pontificating on preserving everything that is outdated, useless or just plain ugly.

He is a sort of socially acceptable fine-food-and-wine Jack Mundey or a plump and somewhat effeminate Diamond Jim McClelland.

Leo is the sort of person who would have been against the introduction of the motor car, anaesthetic, TV or radio; unless he thought of them himself, which he wouldn’t.

I was pleased that Leo was so much against my appointment because it was only then I knew the appointment was spot on.

2) Phillip Adams: Like Leo, Phillip has managed to spend his whole career in advertising. Yet I can’t remember his ever developing one single memorable campaign.

I suspect that actually Phillip has always hated advertising. If so, that must be terrible, to spend your whole life doing something you hate.

But he did bring us Bazza McKenzie, who was perfect for the time. And Phillip also re-arranges millions of words that appear every day in every newspaper and magazine in the world. Or so it appears.

Phillip may be a marvellous writer but he is also a terrible editor, so you can’t read his work every week like, say, a Mike Gibson or David McNicoll, because you never know whether Adams will be really great or really boring because I don’t think Phillip knows the difference.

Alternatively, Phillip Adams doesn’t read what Phillip Adams writes either.

Phillip is now attempting to be a breakfast disc jockey in Sydney and I have even been attempting to help him. But it is hard for a bloke who has lived all his life in Melbourne and whose hobby is collecting stuffed Egyptian mummies to relate to Sydney.

Especially a bloke who confesses that he has never been in a pub, never been to the fights or the races, never seen a game of football of any kind, let alone Rugby League. Never been pissed, never been in a blue, never lost the lot on a certainty in the last at Randwick. Hates sport.

It isn’t just hard for Adams to relate — it is impossible.

But any lingering doubts I had about the correctness of working for the re-election of the Hawke Government were removed entirely when Phillip panned the idea.

The last time this great judge panned anything so fulsomely or bitterly was a movie which later proved somewhat successful called Crocodile Dundee.

3) The Campaign Palace: Rather than answer their petulant criticisms, I will hope The Palace fronts up for Nick Greiner at the next NSW election. Why? Because I think it very important that Barrie Unsworth win.

4) Tony Eggleton: This man is the ALP’s secret weapon. What a track record. Eggleton shot to prominence by looking serious over the demise of Gorton, McMahon, Snedden, Fraser and Peacock before backing up to make sure Howard got no support whatsoever.

I feel sure that if/when Peacock gets the job that Eggleton will go. But I think it likely Howard will keep him on. He makes John look like a winner.

5) John Laws: Lawsie and I have been mates for as long as either of us can forget. But John’s attempts to denigrate everything Labor during the campaign, including the advertising, shows only one thing — John Laws, CBE, is aware you don’t get a big knighthood because of the records you spin.

Maybe Howard should give Lawsie one retrospectively. He’s good at that stuff and Lawsie certainly deserved one for his sustained pro-Howard efforts.

6) The National Farmers’ Federation: If the really did have $15 million to spend, they must have decided to save it all for another election. The only ads I saw were insipid, unreadable and meaningless.

So far the NFF has only served one purpose as far as I can make out: to make former obscure Sheffield Shield cricketer Ian McLachlan semi-famous. For what purpose? I can hear the farmers ask.

In fact, the only people who got it right (apart from pros like the PM himself, and his hunchmen like Cassidy, Farmer, Sorby, Hogg and Emerson) were astrologer Athena Starwoman, who predicted it to the minute by the stars, and Sydney journalist-humorist Frank Crook.

On the last day of the election, Frank wrote that our advertising was pitched to the “orangutan mentality”. Frank got it dead right: we were after the swingers. Have you ever seen an orangutan swing?

Anyway, now it’s all over and the campaign results, like all campaign results, speak for themselves.

I am proud of the role we played. I believe that it was right that we stick with Hawke and Keating on the right track. I would not have done the campaign for any amount of money if I didn’t believe that to be true.

Now let us hope that the best Labor Party this country has ever had is given an Opposition worthy of it and that good men who believe in real competition, especially in political thought, will now be encouraged to revitalise the Coalition in the future. Or begin a new force as Menzies did with the devastated UAP.

The great thing about this election is that for sure now the Coalition will realise that they are not born to rule. And the prime ministership will never again be competed for by a man as lacking in leadership or credibility as the dogged, determined but totally unsuited John Howard.

Sure, I feel sorry for John Howard the man. But I would have felt even sorrier for Australia if John Howard and his disunited rabble had been allowed to bribe their way back to power no matter what the cost.