Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995), Saturday 19 August 1972, page 1


ALP shows its TV talent line-up

From DAVID SOLOMON, Political Correspondent

SYDNEY, Friday. — The Labor Party un-veiled this evening its first television adver-tisements for the 1972 election and in so doing made it clear there would be no early elec-tion this year.

The Labor Party is now in a position to launch a $100,000 television cam-paign to fight the elections while the Liberal Party ap-parently is still trying to work out how it should fight the elections.

The ALP Federal sec-retary, Mr M. J. Young, unveiled the first ALP ad-vertisements at a special showing for the Press in Sydney this evening. They included a 2 min 13 sec colour film for cinemas and television together with 60sec, 30sec and 10sec spots for television adver-

tisements.

They are all based around the Labor Party campaign theme song, 'It's Time', which has been issued as a pop record sung by Alison McCallum.

The films cost about $3,000 to produce and will begin appearing on tele-vision screens throughout Australia on Sunday week.

They are essentially mood pieces, with the song in the background and pic-tures of well-known TV personalities singing the chorus with occasional flashes of still photographs of Mr Whitlam as a stu-dent, as an oarsman, as a lawyer, as an Air Force

navigator during the war, as an international travel-ler, and as a politician, interspersed briefly throughout the film. But in every case the advertise-ment finishes with a picture of Mr Whitlam and his wife, with the emphasis on his wife, and the theme, "It's Time, Vote 1 Aus-tralian Labor Party".

The ALP plans to use a lot of these advertise-ments throughout NSW and the ACT until the elections. In three or four weeks time it will begin using advertisements on policy issues, as opposed to the "soft-sell" ap-proach in the current ad-vertisements. These are now being produced.

Mr Whitlam's

image

One of the aims of he current series is to coun-

ter the picture of Mr Whitlam being cold and

aloof and present him in- stead as being human.

The films contain a

large percentage of tele-vision personalities includ-ing Bert Newton. Col Joye, Judy Stone, John Dease, Hazel Phillips, Ted Ham-ilton, most of the cast of 'Bellbird', Chuck Faulkiner and Bobby Limb, all of whom gave their services free for the advertisements.

The Prime Minister, Mr McMahon, said in Can-berra yesterday that he had not yet decided on a date for the election.

Mr McMahon was being interviewed on the steps

of Parliament House as he left to return to his home in Sydney.

Earlier, he had attended a meeting of the Liberal Party campaign planning

committee.

According to the Liberal Party publicity officer, Mr Edgar Holt, tbe committee had not considered the election date.

He said this was entirely the prerogative of the Prime Minister.

The committee had dis-cussed papers on campaign strategy submitted by the party organisation when it met for about three hours yesterday morning.

The committee expected to meet on several more occasions leading up to the election, but a date had not yet been fixed for the next meeting.

Theme song ahead of its

time. — Page 3.