Phil Cornford, “MILLIONAIRE TELLS WHY HE PLANNED LIB TV ADS,” Daily Telegraph, May 2, 1974, p. 3.

The man who masterminded the controversial NSW Liberal Party’s television advertisements said yesterday he had used his friends for the first series.

He is 32-year-old millionaire John Singleton who opened his explanation of making the ads by saying: “Listen, mate, a socialist is a bum.”

He hardly paused for breath: “I tell you, mate, a socialist is a guy who wants to be compensated for his laziness and his failures.”

John Singleton, you gather, has a personal commitment to the defeat of the Whitlam Government.

“Yair, my oath I have mate,” he says.

“Listen mate, if I could get the people of Australia to listen to me explaining what the Whitlam Government means to them why I guarantee you 90 per cent of them would vote Liberal.”

“Of course I’m anti-socialist. Aren’t you?”

“Can you imagine the Government running big business with the efficiency that they run the Australian Post Office. I tell you, can you imagine that?”

John Singleton, mate, is the boy from the other side of the tracks who five years ago launched an advertising agency named S.P.A.S.M. and later sold out for a fortune to accept a managing directorship with the American buyers, Doyle, Dane and Bernbach Pty Ltd.

And, mate, Doyle, Dane and Bernbach Pty Ltd are handling the advertisements for nothing, nil, nix! They ought to!

They’re Singleton’s brainchild, sold to Premier Sir Robert Askin.

Singleton says: “Mate, I’ll level with you. The first four of the first eight advertisements we made were done by people who were friends of mine or my people. The other four were friends of them.”

“But that only started the snowball rolling.”

“I tell you, mate, we’re being knocked down by offers from people who want to make ads.”

At first, Singleton looked for people who had switched to voting Labor in 1972 and wanted to switch back to anti-Labor again.

Now Singleton wants people who have always voted Labor and who want to desert.