Bob Howard, “Up the Workers!: they stood for legalised drugs, no taxation, abolition of government welfare and free education … but somehow the libertarians lost their head,” Australian Playboy, May 1979, pp. 105-10. Table of Contents»
1. Party Conception: The Bob Howard-John Singleton Meeting
I walked in to see John Singleton for the first time in mid 1974 feeling a bit like a dog that had finally caught one. I was there, but had no idea what I was going to say.
At that time I was editor of a small newsletter called Free Enterprise, which some friends and I published. We had no money and no prospects but were fired with ideological fervour, and as one of our faintly desperate activities we used to try to contact public figures who had made statements we agreed with. We were looking for the big break, I suppose, hoping to find some sympathetic millionaire who would give us the resources we needed to spread the message.
With dogged persistence, but little real hope, we contacted John Singleton. He had stirred up a great deal of controversy during the 1974 Federal election with his Liberal TV commercials. We figured that he might be on our side.
The zippy Sydney headquarters of his advertising firm, Doyle Dane Bernbach, contained a very different world from the one I was working in at staid old CSR. I felt a little odd standing in the velvet-lined boardroom wearing my dark grey pinstripe and clutching my ideology. And the man himself … young, blond and suntanned.
“G’day, buddy! C’mon in.” Not quite the smooth advertising executive I had expected.
We talked about the newsletter and what we believed in and were trying to achieve. We had a few beers, and I know John wasn’t really interested in doing anything to help us. But that didn’t matter, because he had a better idea. Fresh as he was from the demoralising experience of trying to get the Liberal Party to say something specific, and from the impossible task of trying to make Bill Snedden sound genuine, John believed that Australia needed a new political party — one that really promoted all the things the Liberals were supposed to stand for.
John asked me to get my friends together to draft a party platform — and gave us three weeks to do it. Some task for a bunch of amateur political philosophers who knew nothing about the specifics of politics or political parties. I don’t think any of us had even read a party platform.
Still, we were determined to get the party off the ground. Using the credo of a US libertarian group, economist Mark Tier, architect Patrick Brookes, solicitor Ramon Barros and I wrote out our draft. In it we spelled out our blueprint for a free society. It was an extremely radical philosophy with, from a political viewpoint, some unfortunate implications. But we were an ideological group, not a political group, and so we didn’t baulk at going where our philosophy took us. We believed it then and, even after all that has happened, we believe in it now.
Libertarianism — which permits ultimate freedom of thought and action — is by no means new. Its adherents include such historical figures as Lord Acton, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine. Much of the modern resurgence of interest in the philosophy is due to Ayn Rand, unpopularised in Australia by Malcolm Fraser’s supposed admiration of her. Our group grew out of, and fortunately beyond, an Ayn Rand discussion group.
Our central principle was that no person or group of persons (including governments) had the right to initiate the use of force, fraud or coercion against any other person or group. As far as we were concerned, if you left other people alone you could do what you liked. This meant that we opposed such action as theft, murder, rape, fraud, assault and trespass. It also meant that we considered taxation theft, and therefore all things financed by taxation immoral — including government welfare and education. We opposed all government economic regulation, and wanted to abolish coercive monopolies such as the Mint, Australia Post, Telecom and the railways.
We aimed to legalise all prohibited drugs and allow open immigration, permit gambling and all forms of voluntary sexual behaviour, including prostitution and homosexuality. We proposed to abolish compulsory education, voting, and all types of voluntary commitment.
We stood for absolute economic freedom (a simple expression of individual freedom that, miraculously, is not recognised by the left) and absolute social freedom. We saw our major enemy, the chief initiator of force, fraud and coercion, and the cause of most of our economic and social problems, as the State.
Governments, we believed, were to blame for our problems, and did little to solve them. Inflation, for example, is a direct result of government fiscal irresponsibility — printing money to buy favours and gain political power. Unemployment is a direct result of artificially high wage levels that result from wage legislation, the government-created Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, and the trade unions.
In its turn, trade union power is able to bring this country to its knees only because the unions have been made strong by government-granted privilege and government neglect. Successive governments have exempted unions from, for example, the Law of Torts and Damages — you can’t sue unions for damages or losses caused by industrial strikes — and have failed to protect the rights to freedom and property of business owners, consumers and workers.
And it’s all such a con. Union leaders use there members as cannon fodder in a much larger game; they need high unemployment and bankrupt businesses. They need an economic crisis, because it is out of that crisis that they hope to construct their supposedly benevolent socialist or communist dictatorship. In our platform we supported the right of people to join or not join a union, and to withhold their labour if they wished. But we also opposed the distribution of government privilege — to unions, businesses, countries or people. And we would certainly have abolished the Arbitration Commission and the entire vicious paraphernalia of government wage-fixing legislation.
While government interference continues, many of our problems are insoluble. Take the Queensland controversy over street marches. Streets are public property, so theoretically “the people” have the right to use them for marches. But equally, “the people” have the right to keep them free of marches. This is the eternal dilemma with public property. You can only please some of the people; the rest will be justifiably dissatisfied.
Our solution? Abolish public property — sell the streets! The issue could then be decided very easily by the street owner. As with every business, he or she would decide, on the basis of economic democracy, what was best in terms of dollars and cents. The supreme virtue of such a solution is that it provides a clear-cut means of resolving disputes. It is also flexible and responsive to public needs. Businesses prosper by providing what the public wants (in a free market, that is; not in a rigged market as we have now, where businesses often survive on government privilege), so the consumer would, in the end, dictate the terms.
The same applies to public utilities like Telecom and Australia Post, which regularly slash services and hike prices. No private business could afford to be so insensitive to consumer demand.
All these things are so very, very obvious. All it requires to see them is to break out of our knee-jerk mental attitudes — our habit of reacting to every problem with the attitude of “more control is required”, and “the government orta do something”. Governments will never solve all these problems because, more than anything else, they cause them.
There are some very unpopular political positions in such a philosophy. But our attitude was that if our fundamental principle was correct, and if all these positions followed logically from it, then we had no option but to stand behind them. So we did, and in doing so we made the new party an ideological party, a party dedicated to principle rather than popularity. John Singleton raised an eyebrow at some of the points in our draft: “Oooooh, mate,” he’d groan on reading a more contentious bit, “do we really have to say that?” But, to his credit, he did accept it.
When it was finished, we drew up a constitution, chose a party name and decided on a launch date — and in all these decisions we made mistakes.
John suggested that we limit the constitution to one page. He wanted a simple document that would give the “points of order” merchants very little to play with. But we also wanted it to be strict, for two reasons. First, there was always the possibility of an external takeover, particularly in the early days. We didn’t want to start the party only to see it pass into the hands of some organised group of political opportunists. Second, knowing how unpopular certain sections would be, we wanted to minimise the chance of our philosophy being watered down for the sake of political expediency.
The party name was a very contentious issue. We spent more time arguing about that than anything. “Why did you call it the Workers Party?” was the common lament. We initially decided to call ourselves the Independence Party, but at the last minute we realised it was too bland. We wanted a title with punch, and didn’t mind it being controversial. It was speculation about the name in The Australian that caused us to rethink. The Workers Party, too, had already been considered and rejected, but finally we went back to it. It was punchy, we knew it would be controversial and, importantly, it was appropriate — we did stand for people who worked. We didn’t believe in egalitarianism. We believed in reward for effort.
I think the name could have worked for us if the party hadn’t acquired its unfortunate image. The Lang Hancock-John Singleton-Max Newton-Sinclair Hill connotation of money, business and Rolls-Royces didn’t quite fit the traditional image of the name — even though all those people have worked much harder than most for what they’ve got. But in politics it’s not what you are that counts, but what you are seen to be, and our name came to be seen as a typical advertising-style try-on. We ended up caught in a double bind. One large group hated us and the name because it was, in their eyes, a fraud — we stood for big business and the rich, not the workers. Another large group wouldn’t have anything to do with us because, well, you couldn’t tell your friends in Toorak or Vaucluse that you belonged to the Workers Party, could you?
If I could go back now, I would choose the name that most closely represents our ideology: the Libertarian Party. But perhaps it’s as well that we didn’t use that name; it remains untarnished for the future.
The third mistake we made was over the launch date — Australia Day, 1975. It was much too soon. But that was symptomatic of a much more fundamental problem that goes right to the heart of the question of why the party failed.
6. Ideological Party Different to Populist Party
I have stressed the fact that we were an ideological party, and I’ve done that simply because ideological parties are very different from other political parties. The conventional parties are concerned primarily about popularity. Principles are used only when it is considered safe, and especially when it’s convenient. Rather than use them to derive hard-line political positions, these parties either reject them, or at best temper them by reference to their ultimate gods — the opinion polls. If a particular policy is unpopular, then they fall over themselves to show how they support it. If it’s unpopular, then, regardless of what they have previously said on the matter, they instantly seethe with righteous indignation and angrily denounce it. If it’s very, very unpopular, they may even feel safe to moralise about it. Occasionally they make a mistake and back a loser, and then we are treated to the pathetic spectacle of their mental gymnastics as they struggle to change positions.
Orwellian “newspeak” and lovely memory holes reign supreme. “Politics is the art of the possible”, they say. And then, with due reverence: “You can’t do anything unless you are in power.” To that end, politicians willingly pervert our language and develop amazingly selective memories. Unfortunately, by the time they get into power, they’re so compromised that they find it almost impossible to do the things they supposedly want to do. As American newspaperman H.L. Mencken once put it: “Elections are advance auction sales of stolen goods”, and governments merely “brokers in pillage”. Control of government for them is control of the political means of gaining wealth — the vast machinery of privilege distribution. It’s an unholy alliance of power brokers and privilege seekers conspiring to rip off the unfortunate taxpayer.
Given the system of government that we have, this cannot be avoided. Democracy is inherently immoral. It’s a numbers game where at best a majority — and frequently a minority — can do what it likes.
But might does not make right; that’s the philosophy of the lynch mob. The original concept of democratic government was that it be severely limited in what it could do — limited by constitution. This meant that the will of the majority (theoretically), via the government, could apply to certain things, but that there was a whole range of citizens’ activities beyond the reach of government. Some of these were detailed in the American Bill of Rights, for example.
But this idea has long since been corrupted and perverted. The US Constitution specifically forbids involuntary servitude, yet for years America had the Draft. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, yet in the US there are numerous examples of censorship. Our own Constitution stipulates that trade between States be free. Yet, in the recent case over wheat, a majority of our High Court managed to talk itself into believing that regulated trade is somehow still free trade.
Our system of government is not democratic in the original sense. Rather, what we have is an abuse of democracy — democracy gone wild. Government can interfere with, and regulate, any and every part of our lives. They can seize our children, our property, ourselves — at will. They have done so in the past, and will do so until we wake up and stop it. It doesn’t matter which political party is in power. From Liberal/NCP to Labor to the Democrats — they all accept the basic rules of the game. They do the same things to get power, and operate the same way once they’re there. All they disagree about is who gets what.
Of all the major parties, Labor is the most honest, and the closest to have real principles. But even there, the indications are that the future of the Labor Party will lie along the same shameful lines as the Liberal/NC parties. It was ironic to watch the post-’77 election debate in Labor circles over the issue of radicalism versus gradualism. Unfortunately the outcome was never in doubt. Power is the name of the game, and for that reason people like Tom Uren, Jim Cairns and Bill Hartley will never oust the Neville Wrans and the Don Dunstans. More than any other person, I think Neville Wran embodies the future of the Labor Party, a political force less and less distinguishable from the Liberals.
The Liberal/NC parties are no more than very sad and sick joke. They typify what Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw so clearly — the lack of moral courage that is destroying the West. Not only have these parties disgraced their Liberal ideals, they have even managed to go a long way towards destroying those ideals as ideals for most Australians.
The Democrats, of course, embody perfectly the democratic disease. They accept the principles of democracy so completely that they even decide what they believe by popular vote — a totally disastrous course of action. The Democrats’ idea of a third party representing “middle Australia” is somehow or other to position themselves between Labor and the Liberal/NC parties. In other words, they seek to outcompromise the lot of them. Reluctant or weak-willed compromise in the face of political pressure is bad enough, but embracing compromise as a positive virtue, as the Democrats have done, must surely be the ultimate indication of intellectual bankruptcy.
We entirely rejected the ideas and methods of these parties. What we offered in our platform was a radical alternative view of the way in which government should operate. To misquote Frank Chodorov: “The only way to get rid of the abuse of government power is to get rid of that power.” That was our credo.
As an ideological party we functioned differently from the major parties. Rather than take our political positions from opinion polls, we took them from our basic philosophy. We stood for what we thought was right, rather than what we thought was popular. So, whereas other parties change their beliefs to suit public opinion, as an ideological party we sought to change public opinion to suit our beliefs.
But of all the mistakes we made, the grand-daddy of them all was failing to realise what this implied. While we were very definite about not compromising our principles, we made the mistake of trying in every other way to operate like a normal party. We accepted without question that the goal of our activity was to get people elected, and that the name of the game was to get money, to get members and to contest elections. We should have known that was suicidal.
With a philosophy as radical and as far outside the mainstream as ours, the maximum potential thinking vote for us was five percent nationally. The only way we could have increased that figure would have been by the virtual con-trick of hiding the more unpleasant aspects of our philosophy and selling only the popular surface aspects. Who, for example, isn’t in favour of lower taxation? But who is in favour of an open go in heroin traffic? We stood for both but pushed only one, and there are no prizes for guessing which.
By accepting normal political goals, we committed ourselves to a certain course of action. We rushed into launching the party without proper preparation, on the implicit assumption that it was just another job of selling a product to the masses. So we held meetings, ran advertisements, sought media and press exposure and tried to talk everyone we saw, from best friends to taxi drivers, into joining the party.
A national organisation of sorts evolved. The party was run by a board of government directors, made up of John Singleton (chairman), Adelaide doctor John Whiting (president), ex-secretary of the militant General Practitioners’ Society Dr Duncan Yuille (secretary), and me.
They were heady days, and for a while we did okay. Our membership grew, we quickly established ourselves in most States, and we even polled well in our first elections. In fact, in our very first electoral test, the Greenough by-election in Western Australia, we came within about 50 votes of beating the Labor Party.
8. Again: Ideological Party Different to Populist Party
But the mix was wrong. Ideological parties cannot survive by imitating the methods of normal political parties. We just didn’t realise the true nature of the problem we were up against. We should have realised it was hopeless to try to mass market the party.
Conventional political parties when they begin have a very limited time in which to succeed. They have to score at elections because that’s all they exist for. If they haven’t done that within five, or at the most, 10, years, they’ve had it. But ideological parties, facing as they are the huge task of bringing about massive and fundamental changes in public opinion, need to think in terms of 20 and 30 years. Possibly the best example of the methods and dedication such parties need is to be found in the career of Lenin and his Bolsheviks in Russia.
Lenin realised the crucial importance of a strong party structure, of a dedicated cadre of committed and educated party members, and of an effective party newspaper. No party can survive for 20 or 30 years without these things. Needless to say, we had none of them.
9. John Singleton and John Whiting
There was a prejudice in our party against organisation. This was partly an understandable reaction against bureaucratic procedures and structures, but it should not have blinded us to the importance of building, in a systematic and deliberate way, a party structure. If necessary, we should have forgotten about elections for a while and simply concentrated on building that structure. However, the temperament and style of John Singleton was not suited to that, and the rest of us, in our ignorance, were not able to advise him to use his talents in the way they should have been used, while we got on with the job of building the party. Instead, everyone was sucked into the mad chase for popular support. Binding John in the same way we did to our cause was like hitching a champion race-horse to a milk-cart.
Singleton is a brilliant seat-of-the-pants man, not a slow, methodical planner-builder. He never pretended to be an intellectual and did not want to be the party’s figurehead. He thought he was wrong for that, and so we elected John Whiting president instead. But Whiting’s isolation in Adelaide, coupled with the fact that the media made their own choice about who they preferred to talk to, more or less pushed Singleton into becoming their major spokesman.
But good though Singleton was, he couldn’t succeed, because of the fundamental mistake we had made in operating as a normal party. By trying to mass-market our philosophy we misrepresented ourselves, misused the resources we had and made it impossible to get those we needed to survive. This happened because the only way we could make our presence felt was to simplify vastly our philosophy and concentrate on the most popular parts of it. This led to an undue emphasis on economic issues, with tragic consequences.
More than anything else, we became firmly identified as a big business party. We were seen to stand for conservatism and for money interests by promoting free enterprise and being associated with people like Lang Hancock, Sinclair Hill and Max Newton. And how ironic that was, because real free enterprise of the sort we wanted is the very last thing the big boys of the Establishment corporations want. They prefer the closeted world of the mixed economy, where their friends in government can protect them from the rigours of the market.
Contrary to popular opinion, we were not funded by Lang Hancock. He disagreed with many aspects of our platform and correctly predicted that we wouldn’t succeed. He wished us well, and appeared at functions on our behalf, but he believed that it would be detrimental to whatever slim chance we had for us to be too closely associated with him. In his own words, he would simply be “lead in the saddle” — something that concerned him more than it did us. Lang Hancock is a fighter, with enormous moral courage, and there is every indication that his message is beginning to get through to people. I only wish he didn’t suffer from the traditional conservative errors of underestimating the importance of civil liberties, overestimating the importance of defence and not understanding the motivation of the environmentalist-natural living-alternative lifestyle movement.
It’s an unfortunate blindness that seriously undermines his credibility with the most important section of the political community — young people.
Unfortunately, as he feared, his conservative image did rub off on us. We helped this along by another error — beating the anti-communist drum with a series of public meetings featuring Max Newton.
Newton always struck me as a formidable man. He reminded me of Rex Connor in many ways, though he was at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. I really don’t know how much of our philosophy Max accepted. There must have been enough in it that was important to him, but again, in our ignorance, we didn’t make use of his talents to best advantage. Anti-communism is a dead issue at best, and as far as young people are concerned it’s just about a total turn-off — not because young people are pro-communist, but because they are understandably quite cynical about it’s use as a political issue. It was a double mistake on our part, because emphasis on it leads to a misrepresentation of international politics. A good case can be made out for accepting Britain and the US as the two most imperialistic powers of this century; to see the USSR as the big bogey is to do little more than to repeat the propaganda that we’ve been fed in comic books and history books for the past 30 years.
If our association with Lang Hancock and Max Newton helped us to be indelibly associated in the public mind with conservatism, then the NSW Senate campaign featuring Sinclair Hill brought the money image to the fore again. It wasn’t fair, but then I guess such things seldom are. Hill ran because he believed in what we stood for. Like Singleton, Hancock and Newton, he is a boots-and-all, blood-and-guts type of man. He didn’t profess to be an intellectual, but he had sound commonsense and the courage to stand up and be counted. But his campaign was doomed from the start. You can’t mass-market ideology, no matter how much you simplify it.
13. And Again: Ideological Party Different to Populist Party
And because we simplified our message, much of our support was shallow. Many of the people who gave us that support didn’t know much about what we stood for, and probably wouldn’t have agreed with it anyway. All they know was that we espoused some vague notion they believed to be free enterprise, but they would never have carried it as far as eliminating all government economic regulations and all government statutory bodies.
This attitude wasn’t confined to those people who voted for us, either. Too many of our members shared it. Because of our unfortunate image as a conservative, business party, we attracted a certain type of membership. If we had been seen as a radical, libertarian party, it could have been a different story.
This difference was crucial in many respects. Most important was the members’ attitude to party success, which came to be seen in terms of electoral results. We had to do well in elections or else. In their eyes, we had failed in our task.
So when we failed to get anyone elected in 1975, and worse, when Fraser was elected, this support quickly disappeared. And when that happened, the party died.
14. Failed to Attract Young Idealists
The sort of support that we needed, the sort of members who would have been prepared to work unflaggingly for our ideals without the prospect of immediate success, were the idealists in the community — in particular, young idealists. These people are motivated primarily by their beliefs, and don’t need the constant stimulus of electoral success to keep them going.
Unfortunately, because of the way we marketed ourselves, because of the unfortunate image we acquired, we alienated most of these people. There was no way, for example, that we could have gained a foothold on the university campuses. There we were not only seen as the lackeys of big business, but, far worse, we were labelled fascists. In the light of the philosophy we stood for this was a ludicrous claim, but in retrospect I can see why we were seen in such a negative way. It was because we were seen as conservatives. The conservatives’ psychology makes them intolerant of civil liberties, and leads them to repress activities that in any way smack of permissiveness, of sensuality, of a lack of control. Thus they value highly law and order. Almost in spite of themselves, this leads them to attempt to stamp out these very human activities, because that is impossible, finally to champion a fascist police state. This is why Joh Bjelke-Petersen is branded a fascist, and why Queensland is seen as a wowser police State.
The stupidity of the situation was that we in the Workers Party and the people in the universities had so much in common. Our goals — peace, freedom, a decent, human world — were similar, even though our proposed means were different. More than any others, those were the people whose support we needed for our long-term survival and ultimate success.
15. The Main Lessons: Think Longer Term — 20-30 Years; Kick, Prod, Provoke; Don’t Compromise, Water Down or Dress Up
All this need not have happened had we realised the simple fact that we were an ideological party and acted accordingly. If we had thought in terms of 20 or 30 years for ultimate success, if we had realised that our primary strategy was to work on public opinion to create a market for our ideas, then we might have used tactics appropriate to the task.
We shouldn’t have worried about being popular or practical or realistic. We should have been proud of being political ratbags. You can’t change public opinion by telling people what they already agree with. Instead of moving towards the people by watering our message down or dressing it up, we should have kicked, prodded and provoked people into examining their prejudices and assumptions and, by so doing, moved them towards us.
As the radical left has done successfully for the past 30 years at least, as well as Aborigines, gays, women and ecological groups, we should have recognised that the slow process of change is best accomplished through uncompromising, radical shit-stirring.
If we had adopted this tactic, we would have been able to remain true to ourselves. We would have developed a far stronger party, made up predominantly of committed young idealists, and we could have built a public image that more truly reflected the nature of our philosophy. And whereas John Singleton was misused as a leader of an ideological party operating in a conventional political manner, he could have been a shit-stirrer par excellence.
As it was, we survived through 1975 in pretty good shape. Ironically, we owed that more than anything else to Gough Whitlam and the fear that his Labor government was creating in the community.
When Fraser was elected to power in December, 1975, the Workers Party went into swift decline.
Many of our best people were burnt out by the ferocious effort they had put into the election, and while the results were okay (about 175,000 votes nationally), they weren’t spectacular.
But more than anything else, it was the great contradiction of being an ideological party, but operating as a normal party, that killed us. When a party ends up being so misunderstood that it is supported by people who should rightly be its enemies and hated by those who should be its friends, then there is no way it can possibly work.
And it’s all such a terrible shame because, more than ever, I think the ideas of the Workers Party are not only the most important, the most radical and the most integrated ideas ever presented by an Australian political party, they are also the ideas that must be implemented if we are ever to solve our pressing social, economic and political problems. But then, I guess there’s always next time.
Nashat Samir
January 31, 2011 @ 11:24 pm
The next time is NOW! Launch the Party again and sign me up!