The unexpected rise of One Nation in the polls, helped by leader Pauline Hanson’s relationship with mining magnate Gina Rinehart and often uncritical treatment by mainstream media, has seen the reemergence of another historical curio: the White Australia policy.
In a podcast interview with UK far-right figure and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, Hanson declared the origin of her much-discredited claims around “mass migration” was “in 1973 with Gough Whitlam, [who] got rid of the White Australia policy and […] started bringing in different migrants”.
Hanson has subsequently denied advocating for a return to the policy, instead suggesting immigration from supposedly “radical Muslim” countries be banned, and visa overstayers be deported.
Whatever the case, the One Nation leader’s claim that Whitlam “opened the floodgates” of migration is simply wrong. And more concerningly, her rhetoric reflects a dangerous, nostalgic form of politics.
What was the White Australia policy?
There was no one piece of legislation titled “The White Australia Policy”. It was what we might call a policy setting reflected in a range of federation-era acts, including the Immigration Restriction Act, which included the now-infamous dictation test.
It emerged in 1901 from fears about the maintenance of British settler domination over the vast continent of Australia, now imagined as imperilled by the rising powers of Asia. Historian Henry Reynolds explains how the settler population also looked to the Americas as exemplar of “the deleterious consequences of careless miscegenation”, fostering an “obsession with purity of blood”.
The problem, as Reynolds explains, is that the idea of a White Australia was always a myth, one that became more difficult to believe the further one travelled from southern metropolitan centres. Not only did First Nations peoples continue to occupy, practically unchallenged, large swathes of the continent, but non-British migration continued.
Large numbers of South Sea Island workers were deported in the 1900s under the Pacific Island Labourers Act. At the same time, immigration from Asia – previously central to development of the nation’s north – slowed to a trickle.
However, thousands of Italian and other southern Europeans filled these gaps from the 1920s onwards.
Seen as racially inferior to those of British blood, southern European migrants were depicted in ways that mimicked earlier panics around “coloured” labour. Much as in America, non-Anglo migrants went through a process of “whitening”, gaining over time gradual acceptance into the settler community.
Read more: Hanson has tapped into angst about immigration, but it remains central to the Australian story
Who ended it?
What Hanson called “different migrants” have, then, always been a part of the Australian experience. Her claim that Whitlam ended the White Australia policy stands on somewhat firmer ground. Whitlam’s minister for immigration, Al Grassby, famously declared he would “bury” the policy in 1973. But even this elides reality.
Whitlam was happy to claim the mantle of ending the policy, but as historian Gwenda Tavan explains, this was part of a much longer process. The Menzies government removed the dictation test from the Migration Act 1958, which was further amended by the Holt government in 1966 to allow “limited numbers” of non-European migrants with desirable skills.
None of these changes led to significant increases in permanent migration from non-European countries. In 1987, 92% of Australians were still of European descent, with Asian-descendent residents making up only 5% of the population – an increase of only 4% since 1947.
Australia, while no longer enforcing a “whites only” policy, remained fundamentally British. In 1987, some 75% of the population still came from the United Kingdom. The increases in migration from Asia, Africa and the Middle East since the 1990s had, then, little to do with the end of “White Australia”.
One Nation and other critics of Australia’s current immigration policies often claim that, unlike historical migrants, more recent arrivals refuse to “assimilate”. This also gets the facts the wrong way around. It is much more accurate to say waves of migration have changed Australia.
The very idea of multiculturalism, as historian Alex Dellios points out, was a product of the unwillingness of “ethnic groups” to abandon their identities and cultures. The embrace of this concept by first Whitlam, and later the Liberals under Malcolm Fraser, reflected the inability of British race patriotism to offer a believable, inclusive national narrative.
The longevity of the White Australian ideal
The bigger question, perhaps, is did the White Australia policy really end? This, after all, wasn’t simply a piece of legislation but rather an aspiration, what anthropologist Ghassan Hage calls “the ‘white nation’ fantasy”. Writing at the height of Hanson’s first bout of popularity in the 1990s, Hage described how:
Both the “racists” and the “multiculturalists” shared in the conviction that they were, in one way or another, masters of national space, and that it was up to them to decide who stayed in and who ought to be kept out of that space.
To Hage, the formal embrace of multiculturalism was not an abandonment of white dominance, as Hanson seems to suggest, but rather its re-articulation. Yet the same anxieties that animated the coinage of “White Australia” more than a century ago continue to fester on the far right, and indeed animate movements to “take back control” around the Anglo world.
Australians have every reason to be angry at our political elites. But Hanson’s nostalgic and false history does not hold the answer.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
