The White Australia Policy, was touched on obliquely a couple of times, and looking back we have all been trained to see its origin as primarily racist in motivation.
In fact, its primary designer appeared to be more concerned about economic competition and making life hard for Australian workers, and would probably have said the same thing regardless of side issues like skin colour. However, the two issues are hard to keep separate because of our geography, and because of our early treatment of the previous occupants of this country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_Policy
The chief architect of the policy, Alfred Deakin, believed that the Japanese and Chinese[1] 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."
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 bill had support from the labour movement. The policy was dismantled in stages by successive Liberal 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, beginning with anti-Chinese legislation enacted by individual Australian colonies during the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s.
It was not until the Fraser Liberal government's review of immigration law in 1978 that all selection of prospective migrants based on country of origin was entirely removed from official policy. Currently, a large number of Australia's immigrants are from countries such as China and India, though the United Kingdom and New Zealand respectively remain the two largest single sources of immigrants.
My concern about immigration policy in Australia is about the fact that despite being a large island or a small continent, it's size is deceptive, and the debate about race and immigration obscures the reality that its lack of water and its poor soils make its population carrying capacity much less than one would expect from just looking at a map. Unfortunately, those realities are not plain to the asylum seekers, or to the government officials of other countries who have either never been here or have not seen anything of the country outside the major coastal cities, and therefore see this as an almost empty land that could easily take these people in.
Even our governments seem to lose sight of these realities, as I indicated in my reference to Peter Costello's pushing for population growth when he was national treasurer.
I have often though that if the national capital were somewhere other than in the most lush part of this dry continent our politicians may gain a better perspective of the situation.
Today, everyone is an immigrant. JAS touched on this in her comments.
Almost no group living anywhere, now, can claim to be original to the land they now occupy.
The world is overpopulated, and global warming, whether anthropogenic or part of long term cycles, is changing weather patterns making some occupied lands less tenable in supporting the existing population.
Unfortunately, this country, already marginally untenable for our population is looking like becoming less tenable still, but when people just look at a map and our population figures, they simply don't see that.
There are more problems ahead...
PS: I see the other thread has since been unlocked.
