White Australia policy

Gold rush era The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 led to an influx of immigrants from all around the world. The colony of Victoria had a population of only 77,000 in 1851 and New South Wales just 200,000, but the huge influx of settlers spurred by the Australian gold rushes transformed the Australian colonies economically, politically and demographically. Over the next 20 years, 40,000 Chinese men but very few women, nearly all from the province of Guangdong (then known as Canton) but divided by language and dialect nevertheless, immigrated to the goldfields seeking prosperity. Gold brought great wealth but also new social tensions. Multi-ethnic migrants came to Victoria and New South Wales in large numbers for the first time. Competition on the goldfields, particularly resentment among White miners towards the successes of Chinese miners, led to tensions between groups and eventually a series of significant racist protests and riots, including the Buckland riot in 1857 and the Lambing Flat riots between 1860 and 1861. Governor Hotham, on 16 November 1854, appointed a Royal Commission on Victorian goldfields problems and grievances. This led to restrictions being placed on Chinese immigration and residency taxes levied from Chinese residents in Victoria from 1855. New South Wales following suit with poll taxes and tonnage restrictions only in 1861. These restrictions remained in force only until 1867. Support from the Australian Labour Movement march , outside Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne Melbourne Trades Hall was opened in 1859 with trades and labour councils and trades halls opening in all cities and most regional towns in the following forty years. During the 1880s, trade unions developed among shearers, miners, and stevedores (wharf workers), but soon spread to cover almost all blue-collar jobs. Shortages of labour led to high wages for a prosperous skilled working class, whose unions demanded and got an eight-hour day and other benefits unheard of in Europe. Australia gained a reputation as "the working man's paradise". Some employers hired Chinese labourers, who were cheaper and more hard working. This produced a reaction which led eventually to all the colonies restricting Chinese immigration by 1888 and subsequently other Asian immigration. This was the genesis of the White Australia Policy. The "Australian compact", based around centralised industrial arbitration, a degree of government assistance particularly for primary industries, and White Australia, was to continue for many years before gradually dissolving in the second half of the 20th century. workers in a sugarcane plantation, The growth of the sugar industry in Queensland in the 1870s led to searching for labourers prepared to work in a tropical environment. During this time, thousands of "Kanakas" (Pacific Islanders) were brought into Australia as indentured workers. This and related practices of bringing in non-White labour to be cheaply employed was commonly termed "blackbirding" and refers to the recruitment of people, often through trickery and kidnappings, to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji. In the 1870s and 1880s, the trade union movement began a series of protests against foreign labour. Their arguments were that Asians and Chinese took jobs away from White men, worked for "substandard" wages, lowered working conditions, were harder workers and refused unionisation. ==From the Federation to World War II==

In writing about the preoccupations of the Australian population in early Federation Australia before World War I in ANZAC to Amiens, the official historian of the war, Charles Bean, considered the White Australia Policy and defined it as follows:"White Australia Policy" – a vehement effort to maintain a high Western standard of economy, society and culture (necessitating at that stage, however it might be camouflaged, the rigid exclusion of Oriental peoples). Federation Convention and Australia's first government Immigration was a prominent topic of discussion in the lead up to the establishment of the Australian Federation. At the third session of the Australasian Federation Convention of 1898, Western Australian premier and future federal cabinet member John Forrest summarised the feeling of the Anglo-Saxon people in Australia: Immigration Restriction Act 1901 The new Federal Parliament, as one of its first pieces of legislation, passed the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (1 Edward VII 17 1901) to "place certain restrictions on immigration and... for the removal... of prohibited immigrants". The act drew on similar legislation in the South African colony of Natal. Edmund Barton, the prime minister, argued in support of the bill with the following statement: "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." The attorney general tasked with drafting the legislation was Alfred Deakin. Deakin supported Barton's position over that of the Labor Party in drafting the bill (the ALP wanted more direct methods of exclusion than the dictation test) and redacted the more vicious racism proposed for the text in his second reading of the Bill. In seeking to justify the policy, Deakin said he believed that the Japanese and Chinese might be a threat to the newly formed federation and it was this belief that led to legislation to ensure they would be kept out:It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.Early drafts of the act explicitly banned non-Europeans from migrating to Australia but objections from the British government, which feared that such a measure would offend British subjects in India and Britain's allies in Japan, caused the Barton government to remove this wording. Instead, a "dictation test" was introduced as a device for excluding unwanted immigrants. Immigration officials were given the power to exclude any person who failed to pass a 50-word dictation test. At first this was to be in any European language, but was later changed to include any language. The tests were given in such a way as to make them impossible to pass. If a person seemed likely to pass in English then a test in another language could be given. Attlee Hunt, the first administrator of the Immigration Restriction Act expressed it clearly in a 1903 memo to all Customs Officers: "It is not desirable that persons should be allowed to past the test, and before putting it to anyone the Officer should be satisfied that he will fail. If he is considered likely to pass the test if put in English, it should be applied in some other language of which he is ignorant." Migrants who had been domiciled in any of the Australian colonies, or the federation, before the introduction of the act, and wanted to leave the country for a temporary period, could apply for a Certificate of Exemption to the Dictation Test (CEDT). The legislation found strong support in the new Australian Parliament, with arguments ranging from economic protection to outright racism. The Labor Party wanted to protect "white" jobs and pushed for more explicit restrictions. A few politicians spoke of the need to avoid hysterical treatment of the question. Member of Parliament Bruce Smith said he had "no desire to see low-class Indians, Chinamen or Japanese...swarming into this country... But there is obligation...not (to) unnecessarily offend the educated classes of those nations" Norman Cameron, a Free Trade Party member from Tasmania, expressed a rare note of dissension: Outside parliament, Australia's first Catholic cardinal, Patrick Francis Moran was politically active and denounced anti-Chinese legislation as "un-Christian". The popular press mocked the Cardinal's position and the small European population of Australia generally supported the legislation and remained fearful of being overwhelmed by an influx of non-British migrants from the vastly different cultures of the highly populated nations to Australia's north. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 imposed a dictation test, in any European language, for any non-European migrant to Australia. The immigration officer (Customs until 1949) could choose any language, which effectively meant that the officer had the power to restrict the immigration of any individual. Further discriminatory legislation was the Postal and Telegraph Services Act 1901 (1 Edward VII 12 1901), which required any ship carrying mail to and from Australia to only have a white crew. Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 In 1901, there were approximately 9,800 Pacific Islander labourers in Queensland. In 1901, the Australian parliament passed the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 (1 Edward VII 16 1901). Those exempted from repatriation, along with a number of others who escaped deportation, remained in Australia to form the basis of what is today Australia's largest non-indigenous black ethnic group. Today, the descendants of those who remained are officially referred to as South Sea Islanders. Exemption for Māori Māori, as British citizens, were able to settle in Australia and generally benefited from the same immigration and voting rights as other New Zealanders, making them a notable exception to the White Australia Policy. Based on the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, Māori residents in Australia were granted the right to vote. However, the Australian government granted equal rights to Māori only reluctantly. In 1905, the New Zealand government made a formal complaint about the exclusion of two Māori shearers, after which the Australian government changed its customs regulations to allow Māori to freely enter the country. Other Pacific Islanders were still subject to the White Australia Policy. Paris Peace Conference . The "No" campaign claimed that conscripted soldiers sent overseas would be replaced by non-white labour. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference following the First World War, Japan sought to include a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Japanese policy reflected their desire to remove or to ease the immigration restrictions against Japanese (especially in the United States and Canada), which Japan regarded as a humiliation and affront to its prestige. Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes was already concerned by the prospect of Japanese expansion in the Pacific. Australia, Japan and New Zealand had seized the Germany's Pacific territories in the early stages of the war and Hughes was concerned to retain German New Guinea as vital to the defence of Australia. The treaty ultimately granted Australia a League of Nations Mandate over German New Guinea and Japan to the South Seas Mandate immediately to its north – thus bringing Australian and Japanese territory to a shared border – a situation altered only by Japan's Second World War invasion of New Guinea. Hughes vehemently opposed Japan's racial equality proposition. Hughes recognised that such a clause would be a threat to White Australia and made it clear to British prime minister David Lloyd George that he would leave the conference if the clause was adopted. Hughes wrote in 1919: "No Govt. could live for a day in Australia if it tempered with a White Australia". Hughes wrote a note to Colonel Edward M. House of the American delegation: "It may be all right. But sooner than agree to it I would walk into the Seine-or the Folies Bergeres-with my clothes off". ==Abolition of the policy==

World War II Australian anxiety at the prospect of Japanese expansionism and war in the Pacific continued through the 1930s. Hughes, by then a minister in the United Australia Party's Lyons government, made a notable contribution to Australia's attitude towards immigration in a 1935 speech in which he argued that "Australia must populate or perish." Between the Great Depression starting in 1929 and the end of World War II in 1945, global conditions kept immigration to very low levels. Following the 1942 Fall of Singapore, Australians feared invasion by Imperial Japan. Australian cities were bombed by the Japanese airforce and Navy and Axis naval forces menaced Australian shipping, while the Royal Navy remained pre-occupied with the battles of the Atlantic and Mediterranean in the face of Nazi aggression in Europe. A Japanese invasion fleet headed for the Australian Territory of New Guinea was only halted by the intervention of the United States Navy in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Australia received thousands of refugees from territories falling to advancing Japanese forces – notably thousands of Chinese men and women as well as many Chinese seamen. There were also Dutch who fled the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Aboriginal Australians, Torres Strait Islanders, Papua New Guineans and Timorese served in the frontline of the defence of Australia, bringing Australia's racially discriminatory immigration and political rights policies into focus and wartime service gave many Indigenous Australians confidence in demanding their rights upon return to civilian life. During the war, talk arose about the possibility of abolishing the policy. Hostility to this idea was one reason Australia never signed a treaty with China as it was feared the Chinese government would request the abolition of the White Australian policy as an ally. A spokesman for the Labor Party demanded that it be continued, stating: Post-war immigration and gradually dismantled the preferential treatment afforded to British migrants. Following the trauma of the Second World War, Australia's vulnerability during the Pacific War and its relatively small population compared to other nations led to policies summarised by the slogan, "populate or perish." According to author Lachlan Strahan, this was an ethnocentric slogan that in effect was an admonition to fill Australia with Europeans or else risk having it overrun by Asians. Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell stated in 1947 to critics of the government's mass immigration programme: "We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us." During the war, many non-white refugees, Chinese, Malays, Indonesians and Filipinos, arrived in Australia, but Calwell controversially sought to have them all deported. Between 1945 and 1952, an Australian brigade served as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan. Until 1952, Australia did not permit Japanese women who had married Australian soldiers to enter Australia. The Chifley government introduced the Aliens Deportation Act 1948, which had its weaknesses exposed by the High Court case ''O'Keefe v Calwell, and then passed the War-time Refugees Removal Act 1949'' which gave the immigration minister sweeping powers of deportation. In 1948, Iranian Bahá'ís seeking to immigrate to Australia were classified as "Asiatic" by the policy and were denied entry. In 1949, Calwell's successor, Harold Holt, allowed the remaining 800 non-white refugees to apply for residency, and also allowed Japanese "war brides" to settle in Australia. In 1947, Australian immigration law, which had until had been based on encouraging British immigration, was amended to take in more European immigration. The way that Australia took in a large number of European immigrants from countries that were previously considered undesirable weakened the case for Australia as a primarily "British" country and led to demands for the end of the White Australia policy. Given that the purpose of the White Australia policy was to preserve Australia as a British country, it is notable that some of the strongest critics of the White Australia policy in the 1950s were liberal British professors serving at Australian universities. In 1959, the Immigration Reform Group was founded at Melbourne University to champion for the abolition of the policy. Relaxation of restrictions . The Menzies government abolished the dictation test in 1958. Australian policy began to shift towards significantly increasing immigration. Legislative changes over the next few decades continuously opened up immigration in Australia. • 1950: External Affairs Minister Percy Spender instigated the Colombo Plan, under which students from Asian countries were admitted to study at Australian universities, though many more came as privately sponsored students. • 1957: Non-Europeans with 15 years' residence in Australia were allowed to become citizens. • 1958: Migration Act 1958 abolished the dictation test and introduced a simpler system for entry. Immigration Minister Sir Alick Downer announced that "distinguished and highly qualified Asians" might immigrate. • 1959: Australians were permitted to sponsor Asian spouses for citizenship. • 1964: Conditions of entry for people of non-European origin were relaxed. This was despite comments Menzies made in a discussion with radio 2UE's Stewart Lamb in 1955, where he appeared to be a defender of the White Australia Policy. Menzies: "I don't want to see reproduced in Australia the kind of problem they have in South Africa or in America or increasingly in Great Britain. I think it's been a very good policy and it's been of great value to us and most of the criticism of it that I've ever heard doesn't come from these oriental countries it comes from wandering Australians." Lamb: "For these years of course in the past Sir Robert you have been described as a racist." Menzies: "Have I?" Lamb: "I have read this, yes." Menzies: "Well if I were not described as a racist I'd be the only public man who hasn't been." The Democratic Labor Party (DLP) then the third largest party, started opposing the White Australia policy as early as 1957. In 1963, a paper, "Immigration: Control or Colour Bar?", was published by a group of students and academics at Melbourne University. It proposed eliminating the White Australia policy and was influential towards this end. End of the White Australia Policy . The Holt government began dismantling the White Australia policy In July 1966, Prime Minister Harold Holt stated that Australia no longer had a White Australia policy, but instead had a "restricted immigration policy". Earlier in the year he and immigration minister Hubert Opperman had announced a significant liberalisation of immigration laws for non-whites. These included reducing the waiting time for non-whites to obtain citizenship from fifteen years to five years and allowed for family reunification. Non-white immigrants would be admitted on the basis that they were "well-qualified", rather than "highly qualified and distinguished" as had been the case since 1956. According to The Canberra Times the changes would allow around 5,000 non-whites to obtain citizenship. In January 1971, Prime Minister John Gorton stated that his government aimed to establish a multi-racial society in Australia and committed to abolishing racial discrimination. However he stated that there was still a need to restrict non-white immigration. He had earlier stated that the White Australia policy was not morally justifiable, but that "the unlimited influx of colored people would lead to stresses in Australia". Labor Party members Don Dunstan and Gough Whitlam set about removing the White Australia Policy from the Labor platform. Attempts in 1959 and 1961 failed, with Labor leader Arthur Calwell stating, "It would ruin the Party if we altered the immigration policy ... it was only cranks, long hairs, academics and do-gooders who wanted the change." However, Dunstan persisted in his efforts, and in 1965, the White Australia Policy was removed from the Labor platform at their national conference; Dunstan personally took credit for the change. In 1966, the Holt Liberal government modified the White Australia policy in an effort to reduce the strong perception of Australia's anti-Asian racism. After a review of immigration policy in March 1966, Immigration Minister Hubert Opperman announced applications for migration would be accepted from well-qualified people "on the basis of their suitability as settlers, their ability to integrate readily and their possession of qualifications positively useful to Australia". At the same time, Holt's government decided to allow foreign non-whites to become permanent residents and citizens after five years (the same as for Europeans), and also removed discriminatory provisions in family reunification policies. After the removal of official discrimination, preference was still given to Asian migrants of European or racially mixed appearance. A report on the Filipino community of Sydney in 1966 observed that its members – numbering approximately 100 – were all "white" looking, or in Filipino terms, "mestizos" of presumably Spanish descent. "The Filipino Consul General stated that he was the only 'colored Filipino' in Sydney." Nevertheless, the annual non-European settler arrivals rose from 746 in 1966 to 2,696 in 1971, while annual part-European settler arrivals rose from 1,498 to 6,054. The Australian Workers' Union (AWU) abandoned its support for the White Australia policy in 1972. The Whitlam Labor government brought about the comprehensive legal end of the White Australia policy in 1973 as prime minister. The Whitlam Labor government implemented a series of amendments preventing the enforcement of racial aspects of the immigration law. Aftermath Australia's contemporary immigration programme has two components: a programme for skilled and family migrants and a humanitarian programme for refugees and asylum seekers. By 2010, the post-war immigration programme had received more than 6.5 million migrants. The population tripled in the six decades to around 21 million in 2010, comprising people originating from 200 countries. Legacy Contemporary demographics In 2019, Australia has the world's eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 34% of the population, a higher proportion than in any other nation with a population of over 10 million. 162,417 permanent immigrants were admitted to Australia in 2017–18. Most immigrants are skilled, but the immigration quota includes categories for family members and refugees. 1% are listed. Do not use the QuickStats data from ABS for ancestries. Use the full ancestry data series (eg from ABS Community Profiles series) as the QuickStats data shows each ancestry as a percentage of all ancestry responses (where each person can list up to two, thus a far greater number than the total population) while the full data series in the ABS Community Profiles show the percentage of people nominating a given ancestry as a percentage of the population who nominated an ancestry --> • English (36.1%) • Australian (33.5%) • Irish (11.0%) • Scottish (9.3%) • Chinese (5.6%) • Italian (4.6%) • German (4.5%) • Indian (2.8%) • Indigenous (2.8%) • Greek (1.8%) • Dutch (1.6%) • Filipino (1.4%) • Vietnamese (1.4%) • Lebanese (1%) Political and social legacy The story of Australia since the Second World War – and particularly since the final relegation of the White Australia Policy – has been one of ever-increasing ethnic and cultural diversity. Successive governments have sustained a large program of multi-ethnic immigration from all continents. Discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity was legally permitted until 1975. Australia's new official policy on racial diversity is: "to build on our success as a culturally diverse, accepting and open society, united through a shared future". Fitzgerald noted that even in the early 21st century, many Chinese-Australians who had been born and grew up in Australia automatically referred to white Australians as "the Australians" and to themselves as "the Chinese". Historian Geoffrey Blainey achieved mainstream recognition for the anti-multiculturalist cause when he wrote that multiculturalism threatened to transform Australia into a "cluster of tribes". In his 1984 book All for Australia, Blainey criticised multiculturalism for tending to "emphasise the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians" and also for tending to be "anti-British", even though "people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants." According to Blainey, such a policy, with its "emphasis on what is different and on the rights of the new minority rather than the old majority," was unnecessarily creating division and threatened national cohesion. He argued that "the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high" and warned that "we should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world." In one of his numerous criticisms of multiculturalism, Blainey wrote: Blainey remained a persistent critic of multiculturalism into the 1990s, denouncing multiculturalism as "morally, intellectually and economically ... a sham". The British historian Andrew Roberts, in his 2006 book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 praised the White Australia policy as being necessary to "protect Australia as an English-speaking nation". Roberts wrote the White Australia policy was the "right" immigration policy to pursue as he accused Asian immigrants of spreading infectious diseases and stated "Australia had the right (and duty) to protect herself" from Asian immigration. Ihde wrote that the White Australia policy remains a difficult subject within the Australian popular memory of the past as it was the fear of the so-called "Yellow Peril" in the form of Asian immigration and the possibility of Asian nations such as China and Japan posing a military threat to Australia that played a major role in the formation of the Australian federation in 1901.Hanson's remarks generated wide interest in the media both nationally and internationally, but she herself did not retain her seat in Parliament at the 1998 election or subsequent 2001 and 2004 federal elections. Hanson also failed to win election in the 2003 and 2011 New South Wales state elections. In May 2007, Hanson, with her new Pauline's United Australia Party, continued her call for a freeze on immigration, arguing that African migrants carried disease into Australia. Hanson returned to politics in 2014 and ran in the Queensland election. She won a Queensland senate seat in the 2016 election, and retained it again in 2022. In 2018, Hanson said she opposes the White Australia policy. Topics related to racism and immigration in Australia are still regularly connected by the media to the White Australia policy. Some examples of issues and events where this connection has been made include: reconciliation with Indigenous Australians; mandatory detention and the "Pacific Solution"; the 2005 Cronulla riots, and the 2009 attacks on Indians in Australia. Former opposition Labor party leader Mark Latham, in his book The Latham Diaries, described the ANZUS alliance as a legacy of the White Australia policy. In 2007, the Howard government proposed an Australian Citizenship Test intended "to get that balance between diversity and integration correct in future, particularly as we now draw people from so many different countries and so many different cultures". The draft proposal contained a pamphlet introducing Australian history, Culture and Democracy. Migrants were to be required to correctly answer at least 12 out of 20 questions on such topics in a citizenship quiz. Migrants would also be required to demonstrate an adequate level of understanding of the English language. The Rudd government reviewed and then implemented the proposal in 2009. On 14 August 2018, Senator Fraser Anning delivered his maiden speech to the Senate. In it, he called for a plebiscite to reintroduce the White Australia Policy, especially with regard to excluding Muslims (even though Muslims come from different races). He was criticised by politicians from the left and the right, in particular for his choice of words ("final solution"). He was again criticised by politicians across the board after blaming Muslim immigration to New Zealand for the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks. Surveys from 2018 and 2023 have found that over 15% polled have shown support for discrimination when it comes to immigration intake. Support for discrimination was higher on basis of religion then race or ethnicity. ==See also==