Ailsa Craig, “John Singleton: He believes in the Workers Party
(otherwise he wouldn’t be doing this commercial),”
Woman’s Day, April 21, 1975, pp. 43-48.

I most definitely did not want to interview Mr John Singleton.

Singleton? He’s the enormously successful advertising man who directed the TV campaign for Sir Robert Askin against the Labor Party in the last Federal elections, the creator of the two-minute spots featuring the Estonian lady who feared that a vote for the ALP meant the imminent descent of the combined forces of the Red Hordes and the Yellow Peril.

Singleton is also the genius behind those sincerer than sincere ads in which a real-life minister of the church, or some other well-known public figure, assures us that the product he’s promoting is really as good as he says it is … “Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this commercial”.

And it’s Singleton who master-minds the so-called okker commercials, starring the average “beer-slurping” Aussie, the TV image first made popular by Paul Hogan.

A few weeks before our interview was arranged, John Singleton and a group of associates had announced the formation of the Workers Party. With its inbuilt echoes of class struggle and blood on the barricades, it was an odd, and, as I later discovered, misleading name for an anti-socialist organisation.

The new party was widely reported by the media. It intended to contest all major metropolitan seats at the next election. Its preferences would go to the Liberals.

On taking office the Workers Party was said to be going to abolish all forms of government hand-outs, including age and invalid pensions, sickness and accident benefits, all the juiciest carrots politicians of both political persuasions love to dangle in front of the nose of the electorate just before the polls.

The Public Service would go, leaving private enterprise to run the country. Income tax, land tax, company tax — all the government rip-offs — would be no more. Public schools, public hospitals would be put up for auction to the highest bidder. Even the ABC would be sold to private enterprise. The glorious effrontery of it took your breath away.

But I couldn’t help liking the bit about selling off the ABC.

In my view any TV channel that can interrupt its telecast of the last vital hour of the final Test between Australia and England in Melbourne for a program on Eskimos deserves such a fate.

However, the Workers Party could not be laughed off so lightly. It was not a piece of Disneyland fantasy. It was a serious political entity with the capacity to attract votes. And it was led by the prince of okkerdom, an ultra conservative with an hysterical fear of Reds under the beds. The man was either a nut or dangerous. Why must I help to publicise him? Besides, I’m not feeling very well. Obviously sickening for something.

I mention this to the news editor who gives me a cool look and says she’d never seen me look better.

Nothing does any good, even the reminder that today’s my birthday, and on the stroke of 12 I find myself in deepest Darlo, outside Doyle Dane Bernbach, the advertising agency of which Mr Singleton is managing director.

Darlinghurst is his territory. He was born just up the road in Surry Hills, and he lives a stone’s throw away in Paddo, homing goal of the new young trendy elite. Mr Singleton has a swimming pool in his Paddington terrace house. It occupies the space where the backyard used to be.

Singleton is rich, and isn’t above boasting of it. Some put him in the millionaire class. He owns a silver Rolls-Royce. The white Rolls he used to have was blown-up one weekend at Berowra Waters, near Sydney, during the last election campaign.

The Darlinghurst offices of Doyle Dane Bernbach look the part. Glamorous girls in long sleek pants, thick carpets, indoor plants. In this agency there are no lunch hours. It’s part of the contract when you take the job. But no one seems to mind. Singleton’s secretary tells me it’s a super place to work … terrific atmosphere.

And the man himself? He’s young, 33, married, with one son, Jack Patrick. His wife’s name is Margaret and she was his teenage girlfriend. He married her when he was 23. His friends and acquaintances are sophisticated, amusing people like Ian Kennon, deputy general manager of Channel Ten, Clyde Packer, member of the well-known family that owns Consolidated Press, Maggi Eckardt, glamorous model and TV personality.

Singleton is good-looking, with blond hair, blue eyes and a fine sun tan. He looks as if he really enjoys a Sunday morning in the surf. His voice is Aussie with a touch of the okker, but the okkerisms are largely assumed. Once he gets wound up and starts talking easily, they mostly disappear.

We sit down and he asks someone to bring us tea and sandwiches. A great plate of chicken sandwiches arrives in record time and the tea is just as I like it. I do not take an instant dislike to John Singleton after all.

He tells me:

I left Fort Street High in 1958 and I enrolled at Sydney Uni in an Arts course at night.

I’d applied for a cadetship as a journalist but cadetships were hard to get, so I took a job in an advertising agency. I became a messenger boy at J. Walter Thompson for six pounds a week.

The study and the job got too much for me so I gave uni a miss that year. The next year I re-enrolled, this time in Economics. At the end of the year I failed in the advertising section of the economics paper. I had a greater interest at the time in young ladies and the trots. I also realised how irrelevant it was. I think you can learn more by doing things. The old apprenticeship system.

Young Singleton had a rapid rise in the advertising world. He was obviously a natural, though he says he was also pretty lucky. One piece of luck was breaking his shoulder just before his 18th birthday.

We messenger boys were supposed to deliver the letters but instead we’d post them and meet in a coffee shop where we used to get free cigarettes.

Then I broke my shoulder and had to stay home and one day all the guys got found out and were sacked. I was the only one left.

Soon I went to the media department, which is where they plan the advertising campaigns. I was junior clerical assistant to a clerical assistant. One of my main duties was to get the boss his lunch. I stayed there six months and then went to copywriting. I used to write the back panels for the Kellogg’s packets.

By the time I was 19 I knew it all. I went to another agency for more money.

At 21 John moved out of the parental home and set up for himself. He also changed his job again. In the new agency he met his friend and present partner Duncan McAllan, a talented artist and all-round advertising man. He was now earning 45 pounds a week, a pretty fabulous sort of salary in those days for a 21-year-old.

But when he saw an advertisement for a “copy director” at a salary of 5000 pounds a year his own pay began to look small stuff.

At 5000 pounds a year, that was 100 pounds a week — $200. It sounded pretty good but I thought there’s no way I’ll get that job!

Then I suggested to Duncan McAllan that we’d tell these people that for their 100 pounds a week they could get not one staff member but two, that is, an art director and a writer. Duncan and me.

The agency, Berry Currie, bought this proposition. I became their creative director and Duncan their art director. He got 70 pounds a week and I took the remaining 30 pounds.

I stayed there five years until I decided I could do better myself. I was 26 and had no money. I hadn’t saved. I’d spent the lot. I talked to Duncan. He was ready to come with me. We teamed up with a couple of blokes in Melbourne, Rod Palmer and Mike Strauss, and we formed SPASM. [Singleton’s Sydney agency has since been sold to an American outfit.] The name was made up of our initials, plus “and” (Singleton, Palmer and Strauss, McAllan). We figured Spasm was a lot easier for the receptionist than saying, “Good morning, Singleton, Palmer, Strauss and McAllan”.

It took one day to get our first account and I was kept busy sending out 20 letters a day to prospective clients, introducing this fantastic new agency they’d never heard of, run by people they’d never heard of.

We started in the November and by Christmas we were doing all right. We had Norman Ross Discounts, Paul Hamlyn, Pye Industries, companies that in those days few people had heard of. We were the agency no one had ever heard of and we got clients no one had ever heard of.

Seven years ago Norman Ross was virtually unknown. And anyway people used to sniff and say, “Oh, a discount place!” The idea was unacceptable then. Now everything’s discount.

How did we get people to believe in discounts? We knew it was all right. We knew Norman Ross sold the same products as the established stores, but cheaper. They did it through lower overheads, by buying smarter, by, initially at least, taking a lower profit.

But no one believed it.

It seemed the only way we’d ever get the message across to people was by persuading His Holiness to do the commercials.

If not His Holiness at least one of his sales reps.

So we approached a minister and promised to give money to his foundation in return. The first one was the Reverend Barry Howard.

We’ve had seven or eight ministers and the Carmelite nuns since then. We’ve even had Betty Archdale [a very well-known Sydney girls’ school principal].

These people were not paid fees but we gave three per cent of our profits to the Aid to Humanity Foundation. Now all the money goes to the Autistic Children’s Association.

Half an hour has gone by and the sandwiches and the teacups have been cleared away, and I have to remind myself sharply that the articulate, likable young man with the razor-sharp mind is the perpetrator of the notorious “Estonian lady” commercials.

I bring up this controversial series, in which a number of ordinary people appear on television and say why they wouldn’t vote Labor again. For example:

My name is Frank Ryan. I have been driving cabs for 20 years, been a Liberal voter all my life, except for the last time when I voted Labor …

I thought they would cut down this union trouble. How wrong can you be! I thought they would help the kids with their housing problems. How wrong can you be! …

And the one that got up so many backs, including Don Chipp’s of the Liberal Party, who said publicly that he wouldn’t have endorsed the series …

I come originally from Estonia … I escaped 30 years ago when the Russians took over my country … I have lived under communist regime so I left and came to Australia … Today I can see that Labor is disguised communist … I have seen it in my country, Latvia, Lithuania, East Germany and Poland, and now I can see the same thing happening here.

Says John:

I still can’t understand what the controversy was about.

No, it was not Sir Robert Askin’s idea. It was Gordon Alexander’s and mine. We wanted to get ordinary people to say why they wouldn’t vote Labor this time. I was driving along in a cab one day and the driver said some lucid things about the elections and I asked him would he be prepared to say it on TV.

None of the people who appeared on the commercials got a fee. Most of them were friends and friends of friends.

The Estonian woman was a friend of one of our art directors. She’d lived close to communism. Most of us haven’t. She knows what it’s like.

At first I didn’t think of it as a Liberal campaign. It seemed to me just our last chance of defeating socialism. But then I was persuaded it would be more effective if we ran it under the Liberal tag.

Thinking back, I realise I shouldn’t have done it. I should have stuck with the label anti-socialism … anti-Labor.

Singleton emphasises that he is not a Liberal Party supporter. He is purely and simply anti-socialist. “I think the Libs are preferable,” he says with a slight grimace, “the lesser of two evils. But the lesser of two evils is still an evil. If an election were held tomorrow, the Liberal Party wouldn’t win it. The Labor Party would lose it.”

The idea of the Workers Party grew out of the dissatisfaction founding members felt with the two major political groups. People like Dr John Whiting, DFC World War II, and now president of the party; Bob Howard, engineer and publisher; Ramon Barass, lawyer; Dr Duncan Yuille, former secretary of the General Practitioners’ Society; and Mark Tier, economics graduate of the Australian National University, who is based in Canberra. Says Singleton:

I was the catalyst. I got them together.

We started with about 20 members and in three weeks we have 400, with branches in every capital city and in cities like Wollongong and Kalgoorlie. The membership fee was set at $50, with concessions for students.

We feel people have to care that much to want to join. We could have thousands of members already if we wanted it, like the Liberal Party, at $4 a member.

By this time I am convinced that John Singleton is no charlatan. His beliefs are sincerely held. He sees the Labor Party, despite its back-tracking in favour of the private sector, as the villain in the piece. And the Liberals aren’t much better.

As he explains the aims of the Workers Party (not blood on the barricades, after all, but “the party for people who want to work”), I begin to see that there are things in its platform that could well appeal to voters.

“No man or group has the right to initiate the use of force, fraud or coercion against another man or group of men” runs the party slogan.

This, says Singleton, includes our elected government.

From the time we’re born we belong to the government. The government can take out money from us by force (taxation); the government can print as much money as it wants (budgeting for a deficit); it can make us do this and stop us from doing that.

For instance, you can’t keep a hotel open after 10 o’clock at night. Why not? If you want to buy grog at 10 and I want to sell it to you, why shouldn’t we?

And gambling. The government issues licences and decides what’s legal and what’s illegal. They take our money (taxes) to have police going round checking that people aren’t gambling, and at the same time say it’s all right to gamble at the government-owned TAB.

We wouldn’t impose restrictions on people at all, given one condition — that is, they don’t use their freedom to infringe on the territory of others. If you want to get drunk, that’s your affair, but if you drive a car when you’re drunk and damage someone else, you’ll be held responsible at law and be required to make restitution.

A Workers Party government in Canberra would figuratively nail a notice over the doors of parliament house, informing the people that “Taxation is theft”. They’d start to remedy that in a relatively small way, by eliminating sales taxes (you’d be able to buy scotch whisky for about $2), land taxes (no stamp duty when you buy a home), gift duty, death duties. Personal income tax, the bugbear of every wage-earner working in an inflationary situation, would gradually be reduced to a minimum, which, says Singleton, would be about 10 or 15 per cent of today’s level. The ultimate aim would be the total elimination of personal tax.

Private bodies would in the meantime begin to take over the present functions of government. The Public Service would be continually reduced and government subsidies to all business enterprises would be removed. (The farmers would get used to it.) Singleton explains:

What we’d do is let private enterprise compete with the government institutions and so gradually phase out the Welfare State.

Every monopoly in Australia is government owned or backed. You can’t set up in opposition to the Post Office, you can’t run a bus service in opposition to a public bus service. Every time you send a letter by courier you’re breaking the law.

And what about the hard-won privileges: pensions, free health care, education? What, Mr Singleton, do we do with the old and the sick?

We wouldn’t chop out pensions and things all at once. Pensions would go on temporarily, but people would be told they’d cut out, say, in 20 years, and that they’d have to make provision for their retirement through private insurance.

We would get rid of inflation within 12 months and so people would reap the full value of the money they’d paid in on retirement.

If Singleton and his friends ever reach Canberra, you will have to provide your own health cover by taking out private insurance.

But once you’ve paid your first instalment, you’ll be covered for life, even if you have to spend the next 50 years in hospital.

Education wouldn’t be free. It isn’t free now. To say that Whitlam’s made tertiary education free is a myth. All he’s done is take money from some people (taxpayers) and redistribute it to others (students).

What we suggest is that eventually all schools shall be privately owned. And we don’t believe in compulsory education, for that means that the government decides that the child belongs to it from the minute it’s born.

We say the child is a parental responsibility. Parents who care about their kids voluntarily see to their schooling. The government doesn’t have a rule saying kids must be clothed and fed.

And marriage, divorce, widows, deserted wives?

Lionel Murphy’s Family Law Bill is one piece of legislation that comes close to our aims, but with us a bill like that would be unnecessary, since marriage would be a voluntary contract that could be broken by mutual consent.

A deserted wife with two or three kids has lost work time, and I believe it’s up to the father to look after the kids financially.

But if a guy is irresponsible enough to duck his responsibilities, what can the government do about it? Throw him in jail. In which case the woman has to pay for the police to catch him, the law courts to charge him and he gets free board and lodgings at Long Bay.

With us the guy would work in a free environment, or if he was incorrigible, in a jail, until such time as he’d paid his debts. Jails, incidentally, would pay for themselves by becoming manufacturing centres, not just places of detention.

The Workers Party would drastically curtail the powers of the police as we know them.

We’d have an effective force protecting people’s well-defined rights, not running round protecting some government decree that you can’t park here or you can’t go nude bathing there, or you can’t play two-up in the park.

And we’d have a real defence force. But not by means of conscription. Conscription is a coercive action against individuals.

We think that if people were free and happy with their lot, it would be an adequate incentive for them to volunteer to defend their freedom. If this wasn’t enough, we’d give them further incentive in financial form.

The Workers Party supports Aboriginal land rights, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free entry of anyone who wants to migrate here (but without assisted passages) and free ingress for foreign investment. They would sweep away censorship, compulsory trade unionism, compulsory voting, licensing, rent controls, restrictive laws against gambling, homosexuality between consenting adults, the sale of drugs. Abortion would be a matter of individual conscience.

People wrote letters, they made phone calls, they sent telegrams and they all wanted to know more of what they Workers Party was about.

We don’t believe that there’s any chance that we are going to be voted into office at the next elections. But what we do hope is that we’ll start people thinking about Australia, about what the Labor Party stands for and what the Liberal Party doesn’t stand for. And to show them an alternative.

If people were all dumb, bone-lazy, selfish and had no ability to think for themselves, you’d need this all-powerful State. But if you believe, as I do, that people are clever, hard-working, good guys, you don’t need it at all.

And at the very worst, if we fail, if we find that after years of trying to educate people to the alternative, they do after all want a Welfare State, then there’s no point in going on — though being me I probably would try to go on!

Here’s a crash-hot idealist talking, a man who believes that if you reach for the stars you may not get them, but at least you won’t end up with a handful of mud.

The question is, what will you end up with! I think the answer is in that imponderable factor, human nature. There are many people who would do all the right things under the Singleton plan. There are also many who would not. Sure, you can make the man who deserts his wife and children work to keep them, that is if you can catch him! And provided everyone makes regular payments into private health and retirements funds, no one should ever be unable to pay doctors or hospital bills nor should they want in old age. But people are notoriously improvident and I don’t see how John Singleton can change them.

As one well-wisher, writing to the new party, comments: “Utopia has never been really successful, but here’s hoping!”

He’s right. The ideal society has never made it yet. Either it fizzles out ignominously or the pigs take over.

History, unfortunately, is against Utopias.