White Australia policy Totally Explained

Everything about The White Australia Policy totally explained

The White Australia policy is a term used to describe a collection of historical legislation and policies that intentionally restricted non-white immigration to Australia from 1901 to 1973.
The inauguration of White Australia as government policy is generally taken to be the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, one of the first Acts of the new national parliament upon federation. The policy was dismantled in stages by successive governments after the conclusion of World War II, with the encouragement of first non-British and later non-white immigration. From 1973 on, the White Australia policy was for all practical purposes defunct, and in 1975 the Australian government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, which made racially-based selection criteria illegal.
Restrictions on immigration had preceded federation, which began with anti-Chinese legislation enacted by individual Australian colonies during the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s.

Immigration policy prior to Federation

Pre Gold Rush immigration

Prior to 1830, the Australian colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land had no specific policies on immigration; they were predominantly concerned with the transportation of British convicts and the support of these new settlements. Of the nearly 165,000 convicts transported to Australia, only 4,000 were not from the British dominions and of these only 900 were non-white. These figures don't reflect a deliberate bias in immigration policy, rather they likely reflect the ethnic distribution of persons processed by the British legal system at the time. From 1830, the two Australian colonies made deliberate efforts to increase the number of Britons in Australia, as part of a program to increase their population. Incentives, including relocation expenses, were offered to British citizens to emigrate to Australia. This was driven by a "new Britannia" policy which aimed to see Australia recreated in Britain's image. Between 1830 and 1940, 1,068,312 Britons accepted this subsidised relocation to Australia.

Gold Rush era

The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 led to an influx of immigrants from around the world. Over the next 20 years, 40,000 Chinese men and 11 woman (mostly Cantonese) migrated to the gold-fields. Competition on the gold-fields led to significant conflict between groups. The Chinese were frequently denounced by white prospectors and blamed for bad luck and "unfair" competition. 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 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 and refused unionisation.

Stanley Bruce

Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce was a supporter of the White Australia Policy, and made it an issue in his campaign for the 1925 Australian Federal election.

Abolition of the Policy

World War II

Between the Great Depression starting in 1929 and the commencement of World War II in 1939, global economic pressures kept immigration to very low levels. At the start of the war, Prime Minister John Curtin (ALP) reinforced the message of the White Australia Policy by saying: "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."
However, by the end of World War II, Australia's vulnerability during the war in the Pacific and small population led to policies summarised by the slogan, "Populate or Perish." During the war, many non-white refugees, including Malays, Indonesians, and Filipinos, had settled in Australia, but Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell controversially sought to have them all deported. 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.
15% of the population now speaks a language other than English at home. The most commonly spoken languages are Italian, Greek, Cantonese and Arabic.

Political and social legacy

Discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity has been illegal in Australia since 1975. Australia's official policy on racial diversity is: "to build on our success as a culturally diverse, accepting and open society, united through a shared future". The White Australia Policy continues to be mentioned in modern contexts, although few politicians ever mention the policy, except when denouncing their opposition. As Leader of the Opposition, John Howard, argued for restricting Asian immigration in 1988, as part of his One Australia policy, later admitting that his comments cost him his job at the time:
One Nation party received 9% of the national election vote. Pauline Hanson was widely accused of taking Australia back to the days of the White Australia Policy, particularly through reference to Arthur Calwell, one of the policy's strongest supporters:
24 May 2007, Pauline Hanson, with her new Pauline's United Australia Party, continues her call for a freeze on immigration and provided comments about African migrants carrying disease into Australia. 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 Aborigines; mandatory detention and the "Pacific Solution"; the 2005 Cronulla riots. 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 introduced a citizenship test to include a tougher English language test, and a test on "Australian" values. The actual questions of such citizenship test have not been publicly released, and its future is in question given the ALP victory in the 2007 election.
Though the White Australia policy, which had segregated Aborigines, no longer exists, their poor socio-economic conditions typically leave them segregated from the rest of Australian society. Many non-Aboriginal people also suffer from poor socio-economic conditions, despite the provision of state schooling and health care. The situation in 1997 led one activist to suggest that the country could be led "back to apartheid". In fact, Australian government policy from earlier years is viewed by some as the original impetus for the Apartheid system in South Africa.

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