Democratic Labour Party

Yeah, it just, it's haunting our party, uh, for so long.

And even after we win in '72, you think we're kinda done, um, but no we're not because the DLP is still hanging around, even in the form of, of, uh, the Senate and, uh, ma- making it difficult for the, for, for the government to actually get a lot of its agenda through the House of Review.

Uh, talk us through V- Tell us more about Vince Gair and, and Vince Gair at this time.

Uh, Vince Gair had just been knocked off as leader, parliamentary leader of the DLP.

And yeah, for people, uh, of a younger generation, Democratic Labor Party, neither Democratic nor Labor, I have to say, but anyway.

Uh, he had been the leader all the time, had just been knocked off, replaced by Frank McManus.

... that's gonna fly in the face of the electorate.

Like, if I'm Gough and I'm running a campaign for just a half Senate, I'm going, "This is ridiculous we're having this election.

It's impossible to imagine today how the broader society, hospitals, schools, families could have possibly turned a blind eye to these stories, stories being whispered about women dying and occasionally being covered in the media when a charge is laid about a particularly brutal case of a backyard abortion.

You kind of wonder how in the late 1960s politicians could not have been saying, "Enough is enough." But what we often forget is that the Catholic Church had a huge influence over Australian institutions, and the Catholics did it by saying women have to have as many children as they conceive, and they may not use contraception.

And the Catholics did it by saying women have to have as many children as they conceive, and they may not use contraception, and abortion was part of that program, and they had a lot of sway in Victoria.

They, Democratic Labor Party was a Roman Catholic party.

The Herald Sun was the major news organization, and that was a Catholic organization.

Let's go back a few years.

Now, when the Labor Party split in the 1950s, it broke up into a, a Roman Catholic led faction, the Democratic Labor Party, and the old Labor Party.

Now, the DLP was responsible to a significant degree for keeping the Liberal Country Party in power for almost two and a half decades, and it was their preferences which pushed the Menzies-led government over the line election after election after election.

And for their troubles, what occurred is that governments began channeling extraordinary amounts of money into the private school sector, primary, secondary, tertiary.