Political Parties: The DLP

[4thofeleven]

Election time is almost upon us, and what does that mean?

Yes, it means it’s time to scrutinise the websites of obscure fringe candidates and parties! Part of the fun of preferential voting is that you’re not just voting for a single candidate – no, you’re ranking all of them, and you can hardly call yourself an informed voter unless you’re aware of the policies of all those seeking your vote!

Fortunately, in Victoria, there’s a mere sixty-eight candidates for the senate, so this will be a breeze!

Today’s fringe party is the Democratic Labor Party, which split from the main Australian Labor Party in 1954 and attracted the support of Catholics and anti-Communists. They exerted considerable influence at both the state and federal level for the next two decades, but lost influence following the election of Gough Whitlam, and were formally dissolved in 1978.

Then what are they doing on my ballot paper, you might ask? Well, seems after the party was dissolved, it was reformed a few years later, but only in Victoria. Having lost the national influence and Church endorsements the old DLP enjoyed, the Victorian DLP has remained a political non-entity for its entire existence. They actually managed to get almost two percent of the Victorian senate vote in the last election, but since other right-wing parties tend to preference Family First ahead of them, and left-wing and centrist parties tend to stay as far away from them as possible, they failed to win any seats. They’re still confident, however, and this time around they’re running six candidates for the senate. This may seem optimistic, considering the major parties are only running four; but, hey, better safe than sorry, and maybe some freak distribution of preferences WILL result in this dying remnant of a decades-dead political movement winning all six Victorian senate seats.

The DPL website can be found at http://www.dlp.org.au/ , where you can read all their policies, written, for no apparent reason, in Comic Sans. Perhaps they feel that by following the web-design standards of the early 90s, they come across as more conservative than the major parties with their new-fangled, wishy-washy, left wing, non-horrible font choices. Their polices are an odd mix of the progressive – eliminating Workchoices, increased foreign aid to Pacific nations, an emphasis on accepting more asylum seekers into Australia – the appallingly reactionary – large rants against ‘radical-feminist policies, AIDS being ‘overwhelmingly a homosexual disease’ – and the outright baffling – calls for Australia to develop a nuclear power program that would ‘facilitate future options for acquiring a nuclear deterrent capability, and to promote the prospect of New Zealand joining the Commonwealth as a seventh state.

I plan on preferencing the DLP ahead of the outright racist One Nation and the conservatively religious Family First, but behind all the major parties. They’re not the worst option on the ballot paper, but they’re not very good.