To understand the present it helps to have sound knowledge of the past. The suggestion that an entity termed The Muslim Vote will run candidates against the Labor Party in some seats it holds in western Sydney and northwest Melbourne has raised the issue of religious or sectarian parties in Australia.

This has led to some confusion on the right and left of mainstream Australian politics. Two examples illustrate the point.

On Sky News on July 2, Brownyn Bishop was asked by Danica De Giorgio how she felt about a “Muslim vote” and whether we “should be concerned given what we are seeing in the United Kingdom”.

The former Liberal Party minister replied: “Yes, we should because what’s behind it is not simply a religious party – like we’ve had the Christian Democrats or we’ve had the old Catholic-based DLP”. Bishop added that The Muslim Vote is “different because they want sharia law in this country”.

Stop there. The Democratic Labor Party – which existed between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s – was not a religious party. It was formed out of the Labor Split of 1955 when a large number of ALP members in Victoria were expelled from the Labor Party. They did not decide to establish a religious party, they simply reacted to their expulsion by setting up a new secular organisation.

The driving ideology of the DLP was its anti-communism. There were several factors involved in the Labor Split. But the central one turned on how best to oppose communism within the labour movement generally, and the trade unions in particular.

The failure of the Labor leaders at the time – Ben Chifley (who died in 1951), successor Bert Evatt and Evatt’s deputy, Arthur Calwell, to give strong leadership to the anti-communists within the Labor Party heightened the tensions. However, the split would almost certainly not have occurred without Evatt’s paranoia and, at times, manic behaviour.

It is true most DLP members were Catholics. But the party’s first president, Robert Joshua, was a Protestant, as was Jack Little, one of the six senators to represent the DLP in the Senate. Sure, the Catholic hierarchy in Victoria broadly supported the DLP. But the Catholic hierarchy in the Sydney/Newcastle/Wollongong area of NSW was hostile to the party. The DLP was backed by Catholic anti-communist activist BA Santamaria and his National Civic Council organisation. No one hated Santamaria quite like Calwell – who was an observant Catholic.

In time, the ALP split in Queensland along the lines that had occurred some years earlier in Victoria. But there was no split in NSW, where Catholics held influential positions within the NSW Labor government.

The DLP advocated state aid for all non-government schools – but this was not a sectarian position. Moreover, the DLP was the first mainstream party in Australia to call for the abolition of the White Australia policy.

The DLP gave its preferences to the Coalition over Labor – which certainly saved Liberal Party prime minister Robert Menzies from defeat in 1961 and John Gorton from the same fate in 1969. Bishop should be aware of this.

Appearing on Insiders last Sunday, Amy Remeikis – political reporter of the leftist Guardian Australia – made a similar error to Bishop. When criticising Labor’s opposition to a Muslim party, Remeikis said religion has not been absent from politics and added that the ALP “literally split over religion in the 1950s”. It didn’t. However, many Catholics split over their attitude to the ALP, which is not the same thing.

The Guardian Australia’s political reporter also referred to the Australian Christian Lobby and the Christian Democratic Party, which existed in NSW from the late 1970s until recently. The ACL was not a political party and the CDP was only ever a fringe player in state politics.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was correct when, on July 5, he referred to the secular system of politics that exists in Australia. He added that he did not want “Australia to go down the road of faith-based political parties”.

In last week’s column, I argued that it would be unwise to overestimate the impact of any Muslim vote at the forthcoming election. For starters, followers of the Islamic faith are as divided as followers of Christianity, Judaism and other religions.

What’s more, it’s not clear as to the political abilities of those who present as leaders of The Muslim Vote. On July 11, The Daily Telegraph spoke to the organisation’s Mouhammed Kanan. He did not present as an experienced political operative.

There has been some media excitement about the prospect of a Muslim vote in Australia along the lines of what occurred at the British general elections on July 4. The Labour Party lost four seats to independents in electorates with large Muslim populations.

But Britain has first-past-the-post voting. The independents’ winning vote in these seats ran from 41 per cent to 27 per cent, and three of the four successful candidates had very narrow victories. These results have scant relevance to Australia.

If Australia had first-past-the-post voting in 2022, the Liberal Party’s deputy leader, Josh Frydenberg, would have defeated teal independent Monique Ryan in the Melbourne seat of Kooyong. Instead Ryan prevailed with the help of Labor and Greens preferences, receiving 79.8 per cent of Labor’s and 87.8 per cent of Greens preferences.

What most one-time DLP voters and contemporary Greens voters understand is the operation of preferential voting. A Muslim party might be able to achieve a similar discipline in delivering preferences – but this is far from certain. Creating a new and substantial political party in Australia is not an easy task.

For a number of reasons, including compulsory voting, Australian politics over the years has been relatively pragmatic. This may be changing due to the fact the Greens party is moving away from its environmental causes and has embraced an extreme left agenda. But its vote remains a bit over 10 per cent.

In view of this, it is unlikely that Australians will support a strident religious party. None has existed before – despite what the likes of Bishop and Remeikis may claim.