AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY

(ADLP), right-wing political party in Australia founded in 195657 by Roman Catholic and other defectors from the Australian Labor Party. Militantly anticommunist, the ADLP supported Western and other anti communist powers in Oceania and Southeast Asia and strongly backed Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. The party was only nominally labour and occasionally supported the Liberal-Country coalition governments just to keep its parent, the Australian Labor Party, out of power. Electorally it occasionally won a few seats in the Senate but never won seats in the House of Representatives. The decline of the Red issue and the improved vitality of the Australian Labor Party tended to diminish the influence of the ADLP after 1970.