John SingletonAdvertising News, April 26, 1974, p. 4.

It is absolutely amazing the number of empty suits in the marketing business who know so little about the management of this country that they honestly contemplate voting for the Labor or Australia Parties in the new Federal election.

It is obvious that anyone who even harbours these thoughts in their bosom hasn’t taken five minutes to look at the alternatives in a rational light.

The brilliance of the last Labor Party campaign confused a lot of people. It probably was time and people voted accordingly, naturally and unthinkingly.

And I reckon that the percentage of people in advertising who voted for these reasons was probably about the same as the general public percentage.

We knew not what we did.

You only have to read the first written objective of the Labor Party to realise the grossness of the error.

The platform reads exactly:

1. OBJECTIVE. The democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange — to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields — in accordance with the principles of action, methods and progressive reforms set out in this platform.

Nothing has changed since the Labor nationalised banking dream of 1948.

Of course, who decides whether or not Socialism is good for the people is not the people, the issue is hidden. The decision ultimately is made by no one else but the good old Labor party and all its unelected (by the public that is) delegates from all over.

But just in case Socialism scares you as much as it scares me, and anyone else who has ever spent more than five minutes thinking about a society geared to the lowest common denominator, let me write down section four of the Labor platform on economic planning. And note that since last published, “nationalisation” has been changed to “nationalism”.

4. With the object of achieving Labor’s Socialist objectives establish or extend public enterprise, where appropriate by nationalism, particularly in the field of banking, consumer finance, insurance, marketing (the italics are mine), housing, stevedoring, transport and in areas of anti-social monopoly.

The change of “nationalisation” to “nationalism” has gone unpublicised and unnoticed by most. But it is a dubious and devious switch. It is also patently obvious and devious that no change in intention is either intended or real.

But it is a nice red (or at least very pink) herring to get away from the point and on to safer semantics.

Nationalisation changed to nationalism. And this from the “open honest contemporary Government”.

The same “honest, open contemporary Government” that gave us ASIO and Gair and the  Department of Media. In any order.

It is a government which has as its published objects the destruction of the competitive society and its replacement by a society where the lazy, the incompetent and the dumb are protected and compensated by the energetic, the competent and the intelligent.

By stealing from the rich to give the poor until the rich are poorer than the poor. When the rich are already giving 47.5c in every dollar of profit back to society where does the further blood come from the capitalist stone?

If the Government can’t protect the few with 47.5c in every dollar then it is only because the cost of government is too high. It sops of the taxes meant for the people like Wettex on a wet plate until there is nothing left to distribute but the dry and empty plate itself. The poor stay poor while the rich toss it in. No one plays when there are no prizes.

It is so blatant, so obvious, so bloody frightening. And yet people in our industry still talk about Gough and the idealistic policies of the Labor Party. Without realising how close they are to being misled into a society of inevitable mediocrity.

Other people in our industry, an extraordinary large number, keep mouthing empty words about the Australia Party. They speak about it as an “intelligent alternative”.

I wish it were. It would probably be good to have an intelligent alternative. A chance to register a protest vote against both parties. And then a chance to cast your real vote as the second preference.

But the Australia Party is a long way from being an intelligent alternative.

It is rather the Labor Party is lamb’s clothing. Its platform is like a re-write of the Labor platform with a few shockers of its own.

And right in our industry this classic:

To reduce the level of unnecessary and excessive advertising, companies will no longer be able to claim all advertising costs as allowable business expenditure for taxation purposes. Instead, after a transition period of five years, the level of tax deductible expenditure will be based on a fixed percentage of sales revenue. The fixed percentage will very between different types of industry.

The old idiotic academic theory that sales create advertising rather than vice versa.

I have probably preached longer than anyone about the high percentage of wastage in advertising communications.

But the fact is that such waste become inevitably obvious as sales do not react.

Despite what the academics think I can guarantee them that not one client I have ever met wastes advertising money on purpose. Not one.

But that is a fact of life. And the Labor and Australia parties have little time for facts of life.

They live with the delusion that the consumer is an ass and must be protected from himself at all times.

But this time we better think about it. Because what we do we’ll also find that among the Labor Party objectives is a change in voting procedures where the majority can be ruled by the minority and where the electoral boundaries can be played with to make it likely, even definite, that Labor will say in indefinitely.

So the alternatives are simply Freedom or Socialism. Competition or don’t bother getting up in the morning.