End of the white australia policy PDF

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End of the white australia policy...

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END OF THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY It was the Labour Government of Gough Whitlam, elected in 1972, which finalised the abolition of White Australian and went one step further. It publicised around the world Australia’s new non-discriminatory policy. In 1973, when the last vestiges of the White Australia Policy were swept away, of course that brought a reaction. They were upset. They couldn’t believe it. It took them a while to digest the fact that Australia, for the first time 200 years, had wiped its face clean of racism as far as the statute books were concerned. I think White Australia was a far greater inhibition to us than it ever was to anyone that had to deal with it from outside. And the interesting thing that we came close to being marginalised, the way South Africa was marginalised with apartheid. We got out of it just in the nick of time. By the ‘70s, the policy was dead, but Australia was still predominantly white. Events in Asia would soon change this. The communist triumph in Vietnam in 1975 soon saw boatloads of Vietnamese refugees sailing south. If it was up to you know, which country would you head for? I think all the person in the boat now want to go to Australia. Well, the dominant feeling was that we had to give these people a home, especially people who had been associated with either the Australian embassy or the Australian armed forces in Vietnam. Our presence there had encouraged them to fight, so I think we had a commitment, an obligation, to such people, and we fulfilled that obligation. It was a crisis for the South-East Asian region. Refugee resettlement agreements were negotiated, and the Fraser Government took large numbers of Indochinese. This became the most substantial entry of Asians into Australia since the Chinese in the 19th century. Nearly 200,000 Indochinese settled here, refugees and their reunited families, in the 20 years after 1975. We had to establish a rational program for processing people, and per capita we took more than the United States. There was a total bipartisanship because there was no doubt in the minds of any of the parliamentarians I had dealings with about the importance of this policy for Australia, and it was quite a genuine bipartisan one. From this time, at least a third of the annual immigration intake has been Asian. The refugee crisis signalled the birth of a new multiracial Australia. We have only been multiracial in a process which started in the 1960s and was cemented in the 1980s. We changed our definition then of what it was to be an Australian. Up to that point of time, the starting point of the definition of 'Australian' had been the word 'white'. It might have been the most important thing that my government accomplished... because whatever anyone might have said since, the fact that we then accepted a multicultural Australia and accepted that, you know, people didn't have to forget their land of origin or forget their affection for it to be a good Australian, was enormously important in building a cohesive society....