White Australia policy
The White Australia policy was a set of racial policies that aimed to forbid people of non-European ethnic originsAsians and Pacific Islandersfrom immigrating to Australia, in order to create a "White/British" ideal focused on Anglo-Celtic peoples, but not exclusively. Pre-Federation, the Australian colonies passed many anti-Chinese immigration laws mainly using Poll Taxes. With Federation in 1901 came discrimination based on the Dictation Test, which effectively gave power to immigration officials to racially discriminate without mentioning race. The policy also affected immigrants from Germany, Italy, and other European countries, especially in wartime. Governments progressively dismantled such policies between 1949 and 1973, when the Whitlam government removed the last racial elements of Australia's immigration laws.
Competition in the gold fields between European and Chinese miners, and labour union opposition to the importation of Pacific Islanders into the sugar plantations of Queensland, reinforced demands to eliminate or minimize low-wage immigration from Asia and the Pacific Islands. From the 1850s colonial governments imposed restrictions on Chinese arrivals, including poll taxes and tonnage restrictions. The colonial authorities levied a special tax on Chinese immigrants which other immigrants did not have to pay. Towards the end of the 19th century, labour unions pushed to stop Chinese immigrants from working in the furniture and market garden industries. Some laws were passed regarding the labelling of Chinese made furniture in Victoria and Western Australia but not in New South Wales. Chinese people dominated market gardening until their numbers declined as departures were not replaced.
Soon after Australia became a federation in January 1901, the federal government of Edmund Barton passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901; this was drafted by Alfred Deakin, who eventually became Australia's second prime minister. The passage of this bill marked the commencement of the White Australia Policy as Australian federal government policy. The key feature of this legislation was the dictation test, which was used to bar non-White immigrants from entry. Subsequent acts further strengthened the policy. These policies effectively gave British migrants preference over all others through the first half of the 20th century. During World War II, Prime Minister John Curtin reinforced the policy, 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."
Successive governments dismantled the policy in stages after the conclusion of World War II, with the Chifley and Menzies governments encouraging non-British Europeans to immigrate to Australia. The Migration Act 1958 abolished the dictation test, while the Holt government removed discrimination against non-White applicants for citizenship in 1966. The Whitlam government passed laws to ensure that race would be totally disregarded as a component for immigration to Australia in 1973. In 1975, the Whitlam government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, which made racially-based selection criteria unlawful. In the decades since, Australia has maintained large-scale multi-ethnic immigration., Australia's migration program allows people from any country to apply to immigrate to Australia, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, culture, religion, or language, provided that they meet the criteria set out in law. Prior to 2011, the United Kingdom was the largest source country for immigration to Australia but, since then, China and India have provided the highest number of permanent migrants. These results exclude the many settlers from New Zealand unless they choose to apply through the permanent resident program. The National Museum of Australia describes the White Australia Policy as openly racist, stating that it "existed because many White Australians feared that non-White immigrants would threaten Australian society".
Immigration policies before federation
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 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
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, 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.
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" 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 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.
Objections to these arguments came largely from wealthy land owners in rural areas. It was argued that without Asiatics to work in the tropical areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland, the area would have to be abandoned. Despite these objections to restricting immigration, between 1875 and 1888 all Australian colonies enacted legislation which excluded all further Chinese immigration. Asian immigrants already residing in the Australian colonies were not expelled and retained the same rights as their Anglo and southern compatriots, although they faced significant discrimination.
Agreements were made to further increase these restrictions in 1895 following an inter-colonial premiers' conference where all colonies agreed to extend entry restrictions to all non-white races. However, in attempting to enact this legislation, the governors of New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania reserved the bills, due to a treaty with Japan, and they did not become law. Instead, the Natal Act of 1897 was introduced, restricting "undesirable persons" who could not fill in a set form rather than by naming any specific race.
The British government in London was not pleased with legislation that discriminated against certain subjects of its empire, but decided not to disallow the laws that were passed. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain explained in 1897:
We quite sympathize with the determination...of these colonies...that there should not be an influx of people alien in civilisation, alien in religion, alien in customs, whose influx, moreover, would seriously interfere with the legitimate rights of the existing labouring population.
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.
Federation Convention and Australia's first government
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:The Barton government which came to power following the first elections of the Commonwealth parliament in 1901 was formed by the Protectionist Party with the support of the Australian Labor Party. The support of the Labor Party was contingent upon restricting non-white immigration, reflecting the attitudes of the Australian Workers Union and other labour organisations at the time, upon whose support the Labor Party was founded. The Australian historian James Jupp wrote that it was not true that the White Australia policy was exclusively a right-wing cause as the strongest support for the White Australia policy was on the left-side of Australian politics with both the trade unions and the Labour Party being the most militant opponents of Asian immigration well into the 1960s. Many Australians in the early 20th century tended to define being white as being the same as Australian with a majority of Australian states passing laws banning marriage and/or sex between whites and Aboriginals as part of an effort to maintain Australia's white character.
The first Parliament of Australia quickly moved to restrict immigration to maintain Australia's "British character", and the Pacific Island Labourers Bill and the Immigration Restriction Bill were passed shortly before parliament rose for its first Christmas recess. The colonial secretary in Britain had, however, made it clear that a race-based immigration policy would run "contrary to the general conceptions of equality which have ever been the guiding principle of British rule throughout the Empire". The Barton government therefore conceived of the "Education test", later called the "Dictation Test", which would allow the government, at the discretion of Customs Officers, to block unwanted migrants by forcing them to sit a test in "any European language". At the time, Anglo-Japanese relations were improving, and in 1902 Britain and Japan were to sign a defensive alliance directed implicitly against Russia. The White Australia policy led to vigorous protests from the Japanese government, and led to complaints from London that Australia was gratuitously straining relations with Japan, which Britain viewed as a prospective ally against Russia.
For the Labor Party this was a compromise of principles, so the main question for the debate on the Immigration Restriction Act just how openly racist to be, with the Labor Party preferring to openly bar "aboriginal natives of Asia, Africa, or the islands thereof". However, in the end the preferred option of the British, the Education Test was passed. There was also opposition from Queensland and its sugar industry to the proposals of the Pacific Islanders Bill to exclude "Kanaka" labourers, however Barton argued that the practice was "veiled slavery" that could lead to a "negro problem" similar to that in the United States, and the bill was passed.