“‘Cannot underestimate’ people’s stupidity,”
The Canberra Times, May 19, 1978, p. 9.

“I don’t think you can ever underestimate the stupidity of the Australian people,” Mr John Singleton, a former advertising executive, said yesterday.

After beginning a speech to the annual council of the Australian Liberal Students Association at the ANU with an irreverent jibe at the Menzies era and subsequent Liberal and Labor leaders, Mr Singleton described Australians as “13 million people mainly on strike or drunk or at the races.”

He described himself as “the world’s most unsuccessful politician,” and said that in 1974 he had contacted a Sydney television executive, Mr Clyde Packer, and the then NSW Liberal Premier, Sir Robert Askin, about organising a group to prevent the then Labor Government being re-elected.

He had then founded the Workers Party, a title which he admitted yesterday was probably the worst that could have been chosen.

The party had then spent three and a half years “attracting the smallest amount of political support in the world”. It had failed because of its title and because it made the the mistake of telling the truth about the evils of government interference in people’s lives.

Speaking of an advertisement during the 1974 election which caused a furore and was disowned by the then Leader of the Opposition, Sir Billy (then Mr) Snedden, who Mr Singleton said had authorised the campaign, he said, “You can’t knock socialism in the Liberal Party because it’s a socialist party.

In that respect, the Liberal Party was more dishonest than Labor, which made no secret of its policies.

Australia was “the most immoral country in the world,” because it was not using its abundant natural resources to help raise the standard of living of millions of people overseas.