John Singleton, “Freedom of Choice,”
Advertising News, October 22, 1971, p. 4.

defenderDay by day it gets more and more fashionable to become part of the new consumer movement against advertising. Ban it. Censor it. Change it, is the cry. As though advertising has some mysterious power all its own to deprave and corrupt and make you buy more and more Defender even though you have no snails.

john singleton advertisingThe movement is totally unthinking and unnecessary, but it is also amusing.

For example, the very avant-garde universities: Boy the last thing they can stand is people advocating censorship, or saying that pot or free love is bad for you. Boy they don’t want to hear that stuff. If they want to read something, boy they want to read it. And if they want to freak out for a while, boy, they want to freak out for a while. And if they want to free love for a while, boy, that’s just what they are going to do.

It is their life, boy. And they have the right and they take the right to do just what they want with their own goddam life and boy you better not forget it.

Free love, free reading, free tripping.

Everything, but not advertising. No sir. That’s different. Advertising should be banned. Censored. Done away with. Advertising inflates prices. Causes depressions. Avarice. Breaks down family life. Sets false idols. Boy, advertising is really awful.

And that is really the way the academics think, and that is really funny; if you think about it.

You see the pimply academics and the mousy consumerists forget a couple of things:

  1. Advertising never sold anything people didn’t want in the first place.
  2. People like to hear and see and think glamorous things. People like to hear and think the good things, not the bad things about a product.

When you send your wife a dozen red roses, she sees the petals, the dew, the red ribbon and the love. She doesn’t want to know about the thorns.

A true story: Once there was a very ugly girl with the fattest ankles in the world. The first young man (probably a research officer for a consumer magazine) said: “You are the ugliest lady I have ever seen and your ankles are the size of a rather large piano, etc., etc.”

He told the truth. He also dipped out rather badly and made a very ugly girl an also very unhappy girl.

Another young man in search of some adventure, and having left his run a little late, chanced upon this same very ugly and very unhappy young lady and told her she had beautiful eyes.

The ugly lady was immediately very beautiful and very happy and pretty soon she made our hero very happy too.

That is a true story which happens all day, every day in real life, of which advertising is a real part.

But the do-gooders and the mental invalids of our society do not realise this because they are apart from real life. They picture an encyclopaedic, fully-indexed world where the only things that are beautiful are the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts.

A gruesome, boring world where dandruffed, computerised copywriters huddle over typewriters telling the whole inside truth about the new Holden camshaft, and the real odds of your lungs getting cancer call over the world, wherever death is fresh, young, etc.

The only thing that stops the whole thing from being an absolutely uproarious waste of time by some people who apparently have plenty of time to waste, is that the movement is being taken so seriously by people who really should know better.

The consumerists want the Government to control this and control that, and, yes, that too.

They forget that the Government really is the people and that inactivity by the Government is really inactivity by the people.

The fact that things are as they are is because people want them as they are.

The Government has the right (and the people expect the Government to exercise the right) to protect the majority from exploitation by the minority.

To set minimum standards of health and safety is in the public good.

And if a few agitators accelerate these actions that is also well and good and a democratic right.

But the agitation is really an irrelevancy and it is only the ultimate outcome of over-zealous reform that should concern us all.

Prohibition didn’t work for grog. It isn’t working for pot. And it won’t work for tobacco.

The Government may have a right to insist some manufacturers include safety belts in their production cars. It does not have a right to insist that people wear them.

People cannot and should not and do not want to be protected from themselves.

“I am the first and last possession I have on earth. I do not want that another should ever own that possession which alone is really mine.”

Oh, and apropos of something or other, did you see the latest press advertisement for Choice magazine; the official organ of the Australian Consumers’ Association?

There it was: “YOUR CREDIT RATING,” right in the headline.

I get a copy and go through it looking, looking.

The first six pages tell me all the mouth-watering facts about anti-perspirant deodorants.

This is followed immediately, if your nerves can stand it, by seven exciting pages on garden sprays.

And if that isn’t enough, by a further six spine-tingling pages on diet breads.

The rest of the issue seems dedicated to flogging off old copies.

So where is this beaut story about MY CREDIT RATING?

Eventually patience has it own reward. I find it. A mention in some tiny, anonymous editorial.

A personal opinion, apparently unsubstantiated by printed fact, which hums and hahs and ifs, maybes and perhapses through to a dreary non-conclusion.

Horror of horrors, credit rating wasn’t the main feature of the issue at all.

And you know the funny thing? The people who run Choice won’t see the funny side at all.

And that really is funny.
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Here are more neglected Australian essays on consumer protection, including 10 by John Singleton, and a few by Lennie Lower, Lang Hancock and Bert Kelly:

  1. The Case Against the Australian Classification BoardLennie Lower’s Annual: A Side Splitter (Sydney: National Press, 1944), pp. 111-12; originally: “No More Cowboys and Indians,” Smith’s Weekly, October 21, 1944, p. 9. Lower also addressed the subject in an article republished in Here’s Lower (Sydney: Hale & Ironmonger, 1983), pp. 90-91, as “Let’s Become Purer.”
  2. John Singleton, “Protect who from a ‘mindless’ wife?,” Advertising & Newspaper News, September 19, 1969, p. 4; followed-up in John Singleton, “Remember trading stamps?,” Advertising News, November 26, 1971, p. 4.
  3. John Singleton, “Mr. Ralph Nader,” Advertising News, August 20, 1971, p. 4; and John Singleton, “Mr. Ralph zzzzzz,” Advertising News, July 7, 1972, p. 20.
  4. John Singleton, “Censorship should be banned,” Advertising News, March 30, 1973, p. 4.
  5. John Singleton, “The great consumer protection trick,” Nation Review, May 28-June 3, 1976, p. 802. An earlier version titled, “The consumer protection confidence trick,” was published in 1975 over two issues of Advertising News: October 3, pp. 6-7; and October 17, pp. 8-9. Also in John Singleton, True Confessions (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1979), pp. 68-73, as “And Now Announcing Consumer Protection.”
  6. Shit State Subsidised Socialist Schooling Should Cease Says Singo — John Singleton, “The day the parents became citizens,” Nation Review, August 6-12, 1976, p. 1044.
  7. John Singleton, “How the whores pretend to be nuns,” Nation Review, August 27-September 2, 1976, p. 1116.
  8. John Singleton, “How many tits in a tangle?,” Nation Review, September 10-16, 1976, p. 1162.
  9. John Singleton, “The impossible dream,” Nation Review, December 9-15, 1976, p. 187.
  10. John Singleton, “A crime must have a victim,” The Australian, March 16, 1977, p. 8.
  11. John Singleton with Bob Howard, Rip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 52-56, on “Consumer Protection.”
  12. Lang Hancock, “Bizarre rights,” The Australian, February 1, 1979, p. 6, as a letter to the editor.
  13. Bert Kelly, “Great ‘freedom of choice’ mystery,” The Bulletin, February 10, 1981, p. 91.
  14. Bert Kelly, “Problems of a pressure-packed society,” The Bulletin, October 26, 1982, p. 138.