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From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration
James Jupp, migration specialist, surveys changes in Australian immigration policy over the last thirty years since the significant shift away from the White Australia Policy. Jupp considers the history of Australian immigration in the twentieth century; the establishment of the "institutions" of multiculturalism and ethnicity and the waves of attacks on multiculturalism. He looks critically at the impact of economic rationalism on migration choices, environmental debates and immigration, and the impact of "One Nation." Most importantly he covers the controversial issue of refugees and asylum seekers comprehensively.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published December 11, 1998
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September 1, 2014
This was exactly the book I was looking for – a history of Australian immigration policy and some analysis of why and how change occurred, particularly focused on post-1972.
This was written prior to the Labor Party coming to power in 2007 – which is part of the reason I’m reading another book by Jupp that effectively fills in the gap since then, although not up to the current government. Australia is a curious country. It sits at the bottom of Asia and is therefore a huge empty place right next to somewhere that holds over half of the world’s population. And Australia is seriously empty, having a population density that is similar to Mongolia. The problem is that Australia also has remarkably poor soils – it is mostly geologically inert, and so is a particularly fragile continent. Not that we treat it as if it was fragile – no, a key myth of Australia is that it is a harsh and rugged land where men ride on horseback to tame the unforgiving bush. One of the battles then is whether Australia should grow our population or if we have already exceeded a population that is sustainable. The point made in passing here is that it is somewhat hard to argue we have surpassed our sustainable population while we are still exporting food.
But the weight of humanity above us and their, until recently, relative poverty, has always made Australians worried. Initially, this worry manifested less in fears of Asia and more in fears the French would come and set up a settlement. That is more or less what lead to the founding of Tasmania so as to protect Bass Strait. Australia was a dumping ground at first for the excess work pool from Britain, convict Australia – a land that is today one of the most law abiding on earth and therefore, as Robert Hughes said, a nation that does much by its own success to prove genetics determinism as a lie. Take the scum of England and Ireland and dump them at the arse end of the world and virtually no one would have believed so much could have been achieved.
But fear of our north has played a major role in Australia’s immigration policies. The most obvious manifestation being the White Australia Policy – which was the first Act of our new parliament following Federation. It made sure only ‘the right kind’ of people would get to come here by imposing a language dictation test of 500 words that could be given in any European language, the implication being that a language would be chosen other than one the person could speak so as to keep them out. Amusingly, this was used during the Second World War to keep an anti-fascist Czech journalist, Egon Kisch, out. However, he could speak multiple European languages, so they gave him the test in Scottish Gaelic – a decision which was appealed, much to the annoyance of the local Scots, on the basis that it wasn’t a language, but a dialect.
Following the war and the unspoken concern that perhaps the US wouldn’t always be so ready to protect us we moved from being British to our bootstraps to understanding our need to ‘populate or perish’. The problem was that following the war there was full employment in Britain – the British much more likely to come to Australia to avoid housing shortages at home which created decades of ‘mother-in-law’ jokes. Unfortunately, there were also housing shortages here in Australia too, which wasn’t something people coming half way across the world were terribly happy about.
While British immigration continued and in fact grew, Australia also received many displaced persons from the war, many of whom were from Eastern Europe. Although these people where not Anglo-Celtic, they were white (if more olive than white), and Christian. There is a spectrum of acceptability in Australia with the most acceptable end of that spectrum being English, Protestant, white and male.
This was a time of ‘assimilation’. The point was for these people to assimilate as quickly as possible. And this assimilation was to be literal – there were ‘good neighbour’ committees that had annual competitions which involved judging who would most likely pass as an Australian.
Given this focus (or perhaps obsession is a better word) with New Australians becoming indistinguishable from Old Australians there was naturally no attention paid to sustaining the national languages of these people. In a nation in which three-quarters of the population speaks only English, this was a remarkable waste of a resource. This is also a tradition of stupidity we continue to this day. We give no assistance to the maintenance of the spoken languages of our migrants, certainly no assistance to the children of these migrants in sustaining a language they might otherwise be fluent in, while spending millions seeking to encourage Australian school children to ‘learn a language’.
Economic facts meant migration had to be increased from outside of the British Isles. Migration was encouraged from Southern Europe, but one of the factors that distinguishes Australian migration is that it is migration that has long sought to be also ‘economically rational’. That is, we certainly have never asked the world to ‘send us your poor, huddled masses’ – we have generally picked and chosen who will be allowed to come. The Southern European migrants were expected to be working class – if they had been middle class in their home country the fact we didn’t recognise their qualifications saw many finding themselves facing backward social mobility in coming to Australia.
The author makes the point that Australia doesn’t really have ghettos in the same way the US seems to. There are clusters of places where certain migrant groups have settled, and therefore suburbs that are associated with certain ethnic groups, but they rarely actually dominate any single suburb. Once again, this has positive and negative aspects to it. One is that the process of assimilation is sped up in such areas, but it is a strange kind of assimilation. The children of Greek and Italian migrants are often called ‘wogs’ – a name adopted by them to refer to themselves – and they call Anglo Australians ‘Skips’ – after the ever popular Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo. But despite many wogs no longer speaking a language other than English and possibly having a closer relationship with an Italy or Greece that no longer exists other than in the memories of their parents, they have not, nor been allowed, to fully assimilate. The fact they were brought here as working class has also hindered assimilation.
One of the interesting problems Australia has created for itself is in setting up a government department to deal with issues of immigration. Immigration is certainly something governments need to concern themselves with, but people move from being ‘immigrants’ to becoming ‘ethnic’ very quickly and they stay ‘ethnic’ much longer. But issues to do with understanding and assisting the long term integration of people is difficult for a government department that is focused on immigration.
In the 1970s the White Australia policy was finally put to rest – with first the Whitlam government saying that race or skin colour would no longer be the basis of accepting or rejecting applications. However, this was put almost immediately to the test with the fall of the Whitlam government and it being replaced by the conservative Fraser one. The first Vietnamese boat arrivals came within a matter of months of the Fraser government being elected. However, ending the White Australia policy and committing to multiculturalism had cross-party support. And so a rather remarkable thing happened, immigration from Asia occurred at an increasing rate until soon Asia was a major contributor to Australia’s migrant intake. That this happened in what had been the whitest nation on earth, one which had been socially engineered to be white, and occurred with so few hiccoughs is rather remarkable.
The election of the Hawke Labor government allowed conservatives who where feeling uncomfortable with immigration policies to begin to voice their concerns. Not least John Howard, future leader of the country, gave a speech in which he criticised the rate of Asian immigration. This was also the time when Pauline Hanson began imposing herself on the body politic. She won a lower house seat after being disendorsed as a Liberal Party candidate. The seat she won had been held by the Labor party – but she was to prove much more problematic for the conservative side of politics. At one time her party, a bumbling rag-tag group of incompetents, received a million votes. It was this support more than anything that moved the Liberal party to accept virtually all of her policies concerning immigration and refugees. The heartlessness of which has brought about a new consensus in Australian politics, one which takes glee in outdoing the other side in the inhuman treatment of the world’s most vulnerable. This book ends with some hope that given these policies were clearly being shown not to work, that they were only causing asylum seekers to self-harm, that they would be forgotten by now – but such has not proven to be the case. This book makes the point that the conservative party in Australia, confusingly called the Liberal Party, holds very few seats in suburbs dominated by ethnic populations, and that this might go some way to explaining Howard – who, ironically enough, came from one of the few conservative seats that did have a large ethnic population. But racism is a disease of both sides of politics and old immigrants can be made to fear new immigrants and might even have more reason to fear them, given they are more likely to take their jobs than those in the better off suburbs.
Some quotes:
Australia is an immigrant society. Without continual immigration the modern, urbanised and affluent society of today could not have been created. Page 5
Australia and New Zealand are the two ‘most British’ societies in the world outside the United Kingdom. Page 5
Australian immigration policy over the past 150 years has rested on three pillars; the maintenance of British hegemony and ‘white’ domination; the strengthening of Australia economically and militarily by selective mass migration; and the state control of these processes. Page 6
The arrival of many thousands of Chinese on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s ignited a fear which remained central to immigration policy for the next century and has not yet finally disappeared. Page 7
In contrast to the United States, however, Australian racism was not particularly violent except towards Aborigines. Page 7
The dictation test was probably the most hypocritical invention in the long history of Australian immigration, and there have been several. It authorised an officer at the point of arrival to administer a dictation test of 500 words. It was understood, though nowhere stated, that this should be in a language not known to the immigrant. Page 8-9
Australia had become one of the ‘whitest’ countries in the world outside northwestern Europe. Page 9
Before the 1980s immigrants were deliberately attracted by assisted passages, propaganda and recruiting drives by government, employers and some voluntary organisations. Since then no incentives have been held out and entry has become more difficult. The other shift, of course, took place between 1966 and 1972. Before then only ‘white’ and preferably British immigrants were sought. Since then policy has officially ignored race, colour and creed. Page 11
The Displaced Persons intake laid the foundations for a multi-cultural Australia, even while official policy favoured rapid assimilation. Page 13
The Australian population was thus planned and engineered to a greater extent than is true for almost anywhere else. Page 17
No other society, at least before the creation of Israel in 1948, has been so consciously shaped by public authorities and resources. Page 18
Rather than engineering society by subsidising arrivals, as was the case until the 1970s, it is now engineered by selection and exclusion. This is rational and utilitarian. But it often weighs most heavily on those who have most reason to come to Australia – refugees, the poor, and their relatives. Page 19
‘Assimilation’ is a disputed term. To many it meant the disappearance of any characteristics which marked off individuals from each other. Page 22
Yet another example was the ‘competition’ at Good Neighbour conferences, when photos of selected children were displayed and delegates had to choose the ‘Australian’. These measures of assimilation were very popular in the 1950s and muddled together physical appearance and cultural behaviour. Page 22
English is not legally the official language of Australia. Page 24
There are no Indigenous languages with more than 5000 speakers and half of those spoken in 1788 have disappeared. Page 24
Once race had been abandoned as an official distinguishing factor, language became a central concern for policy makers. Page 25
By 1976 Australia had become multilingual. Page 26
No ethnic media or organisations received public funding until the 1970s and few have ever enjoyed much support. Page 28
The ethnic groups formed by European migration between 1947 and 1972 were essentially working class, whatever their origins, although they often had middle-class leaders. Page 29
European recruitment policy between 1947 and 1972 had favoured manual workers. By 1976, 61 per cent of male employed Greeks were tradesmen and labourers, 63 per cent of Italians, 77 per cent of Yugoslavs, 69 per cent of Maltese and 61 per cent of Poles. This compared with 37 per cent of the Australian-born and 45 per cent of the British. Page 30
In general Australia does not have ghettoes in the American sense. Page 30
There was a dichotomy among immigrants between those destined for manual employment, who were mainly Europeans, and those joining the middle classes, who were mainly British, North Americans or New Zealanders. Page 34
While there is little persuasive evidence, it seems equally likely that many Europeans with inadequate English suffered downward mobility. Their qualifications were often not recognized. Page 35
In 1972 about 10 per cent of the settler intake was from Asia, excluding the Middle East. This temporarily passed 40 per cent in 1984 and touched 51 per cent in 1991 for one year only. Page 35
From the 1988 FitzGerald report onwards, policy was directed towards enhancing ‘human capital’ rather than the manufacturing workforce. Page 36-7
The first boatload of Vietnamese refugees did not arrive near Darwin until April 1976. Page 42
The Fraser government is best remembered for its humane approach to refugees and its creation of the institutions of multiculturalism. Page 43
Keating shifted the emphasis of government policy towards Indigenous issues, the republic and the notion of Australia as ‘part of Asia’. This did not necessarily diminish activity in favour of multiculturalism. Page 50
The newly elected Howard Coalition government of 1996 seemed dedicated to undoing most of the ‘Keating–Hawke agenda’ in areas other than liberalising the economy. Page 57
Liberal and Coalition politicians were subject to much less pressure from that constituency because of the nature of their electorates. Page 57
The existence of a specialist department for all but eighteen months (1975–76) since 1945 emphasises the bureaucratic planning role of the state in building and selecting population. Page 61
Multiculturalism is a neologism, a term recently invented to describe something for which there was no previous satisfactory description. It was coined and developed in Canada in response to political pressure from minority cultures, especially the Ukrainians and other Slavs. Page 83
Australian multiculturalism puts less emphasis on civil rights and constitutional protections than does the American variety. It puts far less emphasis on cultural maintenance than in the Canadian case. Page 84-5
Australian multiculturalism is best understood as an aspect of immigrant settlement policy. It grew out of a concern with settlement rather than with cultural maintenance, which has largely been left to the ethnic communities. Page 93
Despite this, cultural maintenance has been a priority of many ethnic organisations but not of the Commonwealth government or the Department of Immigration. It is more controversial than settlement services and goes against more than a century of assimilationism. Page 95
The enthusiasm for Asian languages had waned by 2002, when the Howard government prematurely ended an annual subsidy of $30 million to support their teaching in schools. Page 97
This led Blainey in 1988 to accuse Hawke of ‘turning Australia into a nation of tribes’ Page 107
Bipartisan agreement on multiculturalism and immigration ended in 1988. The turning point was a speech by party leader John Howard to the Esperance conference of the Western Australia Liberals on 30 June that year. In it he attacked trade union power and the idea of an Aboriginal treaty, and he defended the notion of ‘One Australia’. Page 110
No socio-economic data explains why One Nation did so well in Queensland and later in parts of New South Wales, but so badly in Victoria or Tasmania. Page 135
Media comment on One Nation tended to exaggerate its support. While some opinion polls had shown as much as 20 per cent support, this had also dipped to 1 per cent and then risen again. In the 1998 election it stood at 9 per cent, but in 2001 it was only half that, and by 2002 polls were showing it back at 1 per cent. Page 137
One Nation has been the most successful party in Australian history to campaign on a program of limiting immigration and abolishing multiculturalism, Aboriginal reconciliation and a humane refugee policy. Page 138
The ultimate in ‘user pays’ was the charging of detention costs to failed refugee applicants which were not recovered but which prevented them from ever returning to Australia. Page 153
Australia’s fertility rate fell below replacement in 1976 and has never recovered. Page 175
Basic fallacies in the official position include: that punishing existing asylum seekers will discourage others from following the same path (which mandatory detention since 1991 has not done); that refusing to concede that women and children should not be detained upholds the integrity of the system (which simply brings into play other Conventions to which Australia is party); that states such as Indonesia, Nauru and Papua New Guinea are anxious to assist Australia in relocating asylum seekers (which has yet to be proved and seems improbable); that public opinion will remain firm even in the face of rioting, self-mutilation and potential suicides (which is rarely the case in such confrontations); and that the Opposition would be afraid to change its stance on border protection (which was already ceasing to be true by January 2002). Page 198
How did Australia get into a situation where its international reputation and credibility have been thrown away for the sake of stemming such a small flow? Page 199
Australia is likely to continue to take in about 100 000 permanent settlers, 200 000 short-stay business visitors, 100 000 students, 60 000 working holiday makers and 4 million tourists each year. Page 208
Modern globalisation contains the contradiction that free trade in capital, goods, services and information has rarely meant free trade in people. Page 209
Language use gradually fades over the generations which are not replaced by further immigration. Page 211
This was written prior to the Labor Party coming to power in 2007 – which is part of the reason I’m reading another book by Jupp that effectively fills in the gap since then, although not up to the current government. Australia is a curious country. It sits at the bottom of Asia and is therefore a huge empty place right next to somewhere that holds over half of the world’s population. And Australia is seriously empty, having a population density that is similar to Mongolia. The problem is that Australia also has remarkably poor soils – it is mostly geologically inert, and so is a particularly fragile continent. Not that we treat it as if it was fragile – no, a key myth of Australia is that it is a harsh and rugged land where men ride on horseback to tame the unforgiving bush. One of the battles then is whether Australia should grow our population or if we have already exceeded a population that is sustainable. The point made in passing here is that it is somewhat hard to argue we have surpassed our sustainable population while we are still exporting food.
But the weight of humanity above us and their, until recently, relative poverty, has always made Australians worried. Initially, this worry manifested less in fears of Asia and more in fears the French would come and set up a settlement. That is more or less what lead to the founding of Tasmania so as to protect Bass Strait. Australia was a dumping ground at first for the excess work pool from Britain, convict Australia – a land that is today one of the most law abiding on earth and therefore, as Robert Hughes said, a nation that does much by its own success to prove genetics determinism as a lie. Take the scum of England and Ireland and dump them at the arse end of the world and virtually no one would have believed so much could have been achieved.
But fear of our north has played a major role in Australia’s immigration policies. The most obvious manifestation being the White Australia Policy – which was the first Act of our new parliament following Federation. It made sure only ‘the right kind’ of people would get to come here by imposing a language dictation test of 500 words that could be given in any European language, the implication being that a language would be chosen other than one the person could speak so as to keep them out. Amusingly, this was used during the Second World War to keep an anti-fascist Czech journalist, Egon Kisch, out. However, he could speak multiple European languages, so they gave him the test in Scottish Gaelic – a decision which was appealed, much to the annoyance of the local Scots, on the basis that it wasn’t a language, but a dialect.
Following the war and the unspoken concern that perhaps the US wouldn’t always be so ready to protect us we moved from being British to our bootstraps to understanding our need to ‘populate or perish’. The problem was that following the war there was full employment in Britain – the British much more likely to come to Australia to avoid housing shortages at home which created decades of ‘mother-in-law’ jokes. Unfortunately, there were also housing shortages here in Australia too, which wasn’t something people coming half way across the world were terribly happy about.
While British immigration continued and in fact grew, Australia also received many displaced persons from the war, many of whom were from Eastern Europe. Although these people where not Anglo-Celtic, they were white (if more olive than white), and Christian. There is a spectrum of acceptability in Australia with the most acceptable end of that spectrum being English, Protestant, white and male.
This was a time of ‘assimilation’. The point was for these people to assimilate as quickly as possible. And this assimilation was to be literal – there were ‘good neighbour’ committees that had annual competitions which involved judging who would most likely pass as an Australian.
Given this focus (or perhaps obsession is a better word) with New Australians becoming indistinguishable from Old Australians there was naturally no attention paid to sustaining the national languages of these people. In a nation in which three-quarters of the population speaks only English, this was a remarkable waste of a resource. This is also a tradition of stupidity we continue to this day. We give no assistance to the maintenance of the spoken languages of our migrants, certainly no assistance to the children of these migrants in sustaining a language they might otherwise be fluent in, while spending millions seeking to encourage Australian school children to ‘learn a language’.
Economic facts meant migration had to be increased from outside of the British Isles. Migration was encouraged from Southern Europe, but one of the factors that distinguishes Australian migration is that it is migration that has long sought to be also ‘economically rational’. That is, we certainly have never asked the world to ‘send us your poor, huddled masses’ – we have generally picked and chosen who will be allowed to come. The Southern European migrants were expected to be working class – if they had been middle class in their home country the fact we didn’t recognise their qualifications saw many finding themselves facing backward social mobility in coming to Australia.
The author makes the point that Australia doesn’t really have ghettos in the same way the US seems to. There are clusters of places where certain migrant groups have settled, and therefore suburbs that are associated with certain ethnic groups, but they rarely actually dominate any single suburb. Once again, this has positive and negative aspects to it. One is that the process of assimilation is sped up in such areas, but it is a strange kind of assimilation. The children of Greek and Italian migrants are often called ‘wogs’ – a name adopted by them to refer to themselves – and they call Anglo Australians ‘Skips’ – after the ever popular Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo. But despite many wogs no longer speaking a language other than English and possibly having a closer relationship with an Italy or Greece that no longer exists other than in the memories of their parents, they have not, nor been allowed, to fully assimilate. The fact they were brought here as working class has also hindered assimilation.
One of the interesting problems Australia has created for itself is in setting up a government department to deal with issues of immigration. Immigration is certainly something governments need to concern themselves with, but people move from being ‘immigrants’ to becoming ‘ethnic’ very quickly and they stay ‘ethnic’ much longer. But issues to do with understanding and assisting the long term integration of people is difficult for a government department that is focused on immigration.
In the 1970s the White Australia policy was finally put to rest – with first the Whitlam government saying that race or skin colour would no longer be the basis of accepting or rejecting applications. However, this was put almost immediately to the test with the fall of the Whitlam government and it being replaced by the conservative Fraser one. The first Vietnamese boat arrivals came within a matter of months of the Fraser government being elected. However, ending the White Australia policy and committing to multiculturalism had cross-party support. And so a rather remarkable thing happened, immigration from Asia occurred at an increasing rate until soon Asia was a major contributor to Australia’s migrant intake. That this happened in what had been the whitest nation on earth, one which had been socially engineered to be white, and occurred with so few hiccoughs is rather remarkable.
The election of the Hawke Labor government allowed conservatives who where feeling uncomfortable with immigration policies to begin to voice their concerns. Not least John Howard, future leader of the country, gave a speech in which he criticised the rate of Asian immigration. This was also the time when Pauline Hanson began imposing herself on the body politic. She won a lower house seat after being disendorsed as a Liberal Party candidate. The seat she won had been held by the Labor party – but she was to prove much more problematic for the conservative side of politics. At one time her party, a bumbling rag-tag group of incompetents, received a million votes. It was this support more than anything that moved the Liberal party to accept virtually all of her policies concerning immigration and refugees. The heartlessness of which has brought about a new consensus in Australian politics, one which takes glee in outdoing the other side in the inhuman treatment of the world’s most vulnerable. This book ends with some hope that given these policies were clearly being shown not to work, that they were only causing asylum seekers to self-harm, that they would be forgotten by now – but such has not proven to be the case. This book makes the point that the conservative party in Australia, confusingly called the Liberal Party, holds very few seats in suburbs dominated by ethnic populations, and that this might go some way to explaining Howard – who, ironically enough, came from one of the few conservative seats that did have a large ethnic population. But racism is a disease of both sides of politics and old immigrants can be made to fear new immigrants and might even have more reason to fear them, given they are more likely to take their jobs than those in the better off suburbs.
Some quotes:
Australia is an immigrant society. Without continual immigration the modern, urbanised and affluent society of today could not have been created. Page 5
Australia and New Zealand are the two ‘most British’ societies in the world outside the United Kingdom. Page 5
Australian immigration policy over the past 150 years has rested on three pillars; the maintenance of British hegemony and ‘white’ domination; the strengthening of Australia economically and militarily by selective mass migration; and the state control of these processes. Page 6
The arrival of many thousands of Chinese on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s ignited a fear which remained central to immigration policy for the next century and has not yet finally disappeared. Page 7
In contrast to the United States, however, Australian racism was not particularly violent except towards Aborigines. Page 7
The dictation test was probably the most hypocritical invention in the long history of Australian immigration, and there have been several. It authorised an officer at the point of arrival to administer a dictation test of 500 words. It was understood, though nowhere stated, that this should be in a language not known to the immigrant. Page 8-9
Australia had become one of the ‘whitest’ countries in the world outside northwestern Europe. Page 9
Before the 1980s immigrants were deliberately attracted by assisted passages, propaganda and recruiting drives by government, employers and some voluntary organisations. Since then no incentives have been held out and entry has become more difficult. The other shift, of course, took place between 1966 and 1972. Before then only ‘white’ and preferably British immigrants were sought. Since then policy has officially ignored race, colour and creed. Page 11
The Displaced Persons intake laid the foundations for a multi-cultural Australia, even while official policy favoured rapid assimilation. Page 13
The Australian population was thus planned and engineered to a greater extent than is true for almost anywhere else. Page 17
No other society, at least before the creation of Israel in 1948, has been so consciously shaped by public authorities and resources. Page 18
Rather than engineering society by subsidising arrivals, as was the case until the 1970s, it is now engineered by selection and exclusion. This is rational and utilitarian. But it often weighs most heavily on those who have most reason to come to Australia – refugees, the poor, and their relatives. Page 19
‘Assimilation’ is a disputed term. To many it meant the disappearance of any characteristics which marked off individuals from each other. Page 22
Yet another example was the ‘competition’ at Good Neighbour conferences, when photos of selected children were displayed and delegates had to choose the ‘Australian’. These measures of assimilation were very popular in the 1950s and muddled together physical appearance and cultural behaviour. Page 22
English is not legally the official language of Australia. Page 24
There are no Indigenous languages with more than 5000 speakers and half of those spoken in 1788 have disappeared. Page 24
Once race had been abandoned as an official distinguishing factor, language became a central concern for policy makers. Page 25
By 1976 Australia had become multilingual. Page 26
No ethnic media or organisations received public funding until the 1970s and few have ever enjoyed much support. Page 28
The ethnic groups formed by European migration between 1947 and 1972 were essentially working class, whatever their origins, although they often had middle-class leaders. Page 29
European recruitment policy between 1947 and 1972 had favoured manual workers. By 1976, 61 per cent of male employed Greeks were tradesmen and labourers, 63 per cent of Italians, 77 per cent of Yugoslavs, 69 per cent of Maltese and 61 per cent of Poles. This compared with 37 per cent of the Australian-born and 45 per cent of the British. Page 30
In general Australia does not have ghettoes in the American sense. Page 30
There was a dichotomy among immigrants between those destined for manual employment, who were mainly Europeans, and those joining the middle classes, who were mainly British, North Americans or New Zealanders. Page 34
While there is little persuasive evidence, it seems equally likely that many Europeans with inadequate English suffered downward mobility. Their qualifications were often not recognized. Page 35
In 1972 about 10 per cent of the settler intake was from Asia, excluding the Middle East. This temporarily passed 40 per cent in 1984 and touched 51 per cent in 1991 for one year only. Page 35
From the 1988 FitzGerald report onwards, policy was directed towards enhancing ‘human capital’ rather than the manufacturing workforce. Page 36-7
The first boatload of Vietnamese refugees did not arrive near Darwin until April 1976. Page 42
The Fraser government is best remembered for its humane approach to refugees and its creation of the institutions of multiculturalism. Page 43
Keating shifted the emphasis of government policy towards Indigenous issues, the republic and the notion of Australia as ‘part of Asia’. This did not necessarily diminish activity in favour of multiculturalism. Page 50
The newly elected Howard Coalition government of 1996 seemed dedicated to undoing most of the ‘Keating–Hawke agenda’ in areas other than liberalising the economy. Page 57
Liberal and Coalition politicians were subject to much less pressure from that constituency because of the nature of their electorates. Page 57
The existence of a specialist department for all but eighteen months (1975–76) since 1945 emphasises the bureaucratic planning role of the state in building and selecting population. Page 61
Multiculturalism is a neologism, a term recently invented to describe something for which there was no previous satisfactory description. It was coined and developed in Canada in response to political pressure from minority cultures, especially the Ukrainians and other Slavs. Page 83
Australian multiculturalism puts less emphasis on civil rights and constitutional protections than does the American variety. It puts far less emphasis on cultural maintenance than in the Canadian case. Page 84-5
Australian multiculturalism is best understood as an aspect of immigrant settlement policy. It grew out of a concern with settlement rather than with cultural maintenance, which has largely been left to the ethnic communities. Page 93
Despite this, cultural maintenance has been a priority of many ethnic organisations but not of the Commonwealth government or the Department of Immigration. It is more controversial than settlement services and goes against more than a century of assimilationism. Page 95
The enthusiasm for Asian languages had waned by 2002, when the Howard government prematurely ended an annual subsidy of $30 million to support their teaching in schools. Page 97
This led Blainey in 1988 to accuse Hawke of ‘turning Australia into a nation of tribes’ Page 107
Bipartisan agreement on multiculturalism and immigration ended in 1988. The turning point was a speech by party leader John Howard to the Esperance conference of the Western Australia Liberals on 30 June that year. In it he attacked trade union power and the idea of an Aboriginal treaty, and he defended the notion of ‘One Australia’. Page 110
No socio-economic data explains why One Nation did so well in Queensland and later in parts of New South Wales, but so badly in Victoria or Tasmania. Page 135
Media comment on One Nation tended to exaggerate its support. While some opinion polls had shown as much as 20 per cent support, this had also dipped to 1 per cent and then risen again. In the 1998 election it stood at 9 per cent, but in 2001 it was only half that, and by 2002 polls were showing it back at 1 per cent. Page 137
One Nation has been the most successful party in Australian history to campaign on a program of limiting immigration and abolishing multiculturalism, Aboriginal reconciliation and a humane refugee policy. Page 138
The ultimate in ‘user pays’ was the charging of detention costs to failed refugee applicants which were not recovered but which prevented them from ever returning to Australia. Page 153
Australia’s fertility rate fell below replacement in 1976 and has never recovered. Page 175
Basic fallacies in the official position include: that punishing existing asylum seekers will discourage others from following the same path (which mandatory detention since 1991 has not done); that refusing to concede that women and children should not be detained upholds the integrity of the system (which simply brings into play other Conventions to which Australia is party); that states such as Indonesia, Nauru and Papua New Guinea are anxious to assist Australia in relocating asylum seekers (which has yet to be proved and seems improbable); that public opinion will remain firm even in the face of rioting, self-mutilation and potential suicides (which is rarely the case in such confrontations); and that the Opposition would be afraid to change its stance on border protection (which was already ceasing to be true by January 2002). Page 198
How did Australia get into a situation where its international reputation and credibility have been thrown away for the sake of stemming such a small flow? Page 199
Australia is likely to continue to take in about 100 000 permanent settlers, 200 000 short-stay business visitors, 100 000 students, 60 000 working holiday makers and 4 million tourists each year. Page 208
Modern globalisation contains the contradiction that free trade in capital, goods, services and information has rarely meant free trade in people. Page 209
Language use gradually fades over the generations which are not replaced by further immigration. Page 211
March 20, 2007
One of those books you have to read for class... then think to yourself, "Why did I just read that?"
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