Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist)
The Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) (ALP-AC) was a split of members of the right wing of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in April 1955, from Catholics of Irish descent. The ALP-AC called itself the Democratic Labor Party from 1957 and disbanded in 1978.
Demarcation
The name Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) was used as early as the 1930s and from 1940 to 1941 by splinter groups of the ALP group, which supported the election of Prime Minister Jack Lang of New South Wales .
Party development
During the time of Australia's first economic crisis in the early 1890s, wages deteriorated, working conditions and working hours increased. When the unions went on strike, they were unsuccessful and the Australian Labor Party was founded in 1891 and tried to formulate and enforce workers' demands politically. However, the ALP succeeded only later to provide Australian prime ministers at the federal level: Andrew Fisher (1908–1909, 1910–1913 and 1914–1915), John Curtin (1941–1945) and Ben Chifley (1945–49).
After the experiences of the Second World War and the spread of socialist ideas in the Soviet Union and in the People's Republic of China , the Australian labor movement developed politically to the left and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) also had political influence in the Australian trade union movement and became its members elected as union secretary.
A split in the labor movement arose in the Australian coal mine strike of 1949 when the ruling Labor Party of Ben Chifley put down this strike by deploying the military, because they suspected the CPA behind it and wanted to suppress its influence. In the election that followed in 1949, the Labor government was voted out of office. In the ALP there was a right and a left wing, whereby the ALP-AC was more of a political center-right party. The right wing of the ALP feared that communist ideas could gain influence in the ALP and in the trade unions. Subsequently, in April 1955, a group of parliamentarians from the Labor Party split off and founded the ALP-AC, which subsequently prevented the ALP from participating in government and later renamed itself the Democratic Labor Party in 1957.
Seven members of the Victoria Parliament and eighteen of the Australian Federal Parliament left the ALP in 1955. The resigned MPs were all but two of the Roman Catholic faith and all but two of them were of Irish descent, and as a result of the split, there was a removal of Irish Catholic representation in the ALP. However, other members of the ALP-AC did not come from Ireland , but from Catholic countries in southern Europe.
Individual evidence
- ^ Robert Murray (1970), The Split. Australian Labor in the fifties , FW Cheshire, Melbourne, Victoria
- ^ Democratic Labor Party (NSW Branch) - Official Website : Origins and early history of the democratic Labor Party , accessed March 16, 2011
- ↑ Paul Strangio and Brian Costar (2005), "BA Santamaria: Religion as Politics", in Brian Costar, Peter Love, Paul Strangio (ed.), The Great Schism laboratory. A Retrospective , Scribe Publications, Melbourne.
- ^ Lyle Allan (1988), Irish Ethnicity and the Democratic Labor Party , Politics , Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 28-34.
- ^ Ernest Healy (1993): Ethnic ALP Branches - The Balkanization of Labor , in People and Place Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 38.