Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist)

The Australian Labor Party (Anti - Communist ) (ALP -AC) was a spin-off from members of the right wing of the Australian Labor Party (ALP ) in April 1955, of Catholic believers Irish descent. The ALP -AC was called from 1957 Democratic Labor Party and disbanded in 1978.

Demarcation

The name Australian Labor Party (Anti - Communist ) was used grouping already in the 1930s and from 1940 to 1941 of splinter groups of the ALP, which supported the election of the Prime Minister Jack Lang of New South Wales.

Party development

In the time of the first economic crisis of the early 1890s in Australia deteriorated wages, working conditions and working hours increased. As the unions strike, they did not succeed and the Australian Labor Party was founded in 1891 and tried to formulate policy and to enforce the demands of the workers. However, it succeeded the ALP to ask later Australian Prime Minister at the federal level: Andrew Fisher (1908-1909, 1910-1913 and 1914-1915), John Curtin (1941-1945) and Ben Chifley ( 1945-49).

After the experience of the Second World War and the spread of socialist idea in the Soviet Union and in China, the Australian labor movement developed politically to the left and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA ) had mainly political influence in the Australian trade union movement and its members were to union officials, selected.

A split in the labor movement emerged in the Australian coal mining strike of 1949 when the ruling Labor Party of Ben Chifley this strike reflected by use of the military, because they suspected behind the CPA and its influence would push back. In the subsequent elections in 1949, the Labor government was voted out. In the ALP, there was a right and a left wing, it was more a center-right political party in the ALP -AC. The right wing of the ALP feared that communist ideas in the ALP and the unions could gain influence. In another episode, a group of parliamentarians from the laboratory Party seceded in April 1955 and founded the ALP- AC, a government of the ALP disabled in the subsequent period and later in 1957 umnannte Democratic Labor Party.

Seven members of the Parliament of Victoria and eighteen of the Federal Parliament of Australia came in 1955 from the ALP from. The well-trodden members of parliament were Roman Catholic faith to two, and up to two they were of Irish descent and as a result the party split, there was a distance Irish- Catholic imagination in the ALP. However, other members of the ALP -AC did not come from Ireland, but from the Catholic countries of Southern Europe.