The long demise of the White Australia Policy.(History)

THE CENTRAL ARGUMENT of Keith Windschuttle's The White Australia Policy (Macleay Press, 2004) is that over the last thirty-five years a misleading consensus has emerged about the origins of the White Australia policy. In numerous books and articles, the leading academic historians of Australian race relations have claimed that the federal parliament's decision to pass the Immigration Resection Bill in 1901 and prohibit non-European immigration to Australia was motivated by a national fixation with preserving the "racial purity" of the Australian people. Members of this school have thus routinely compared Federation Australia with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. Their assertion is that only a country in which Nazi-like biological racism was the "universal ideology of the era" could have introduced the immoral and discriminatory immigration policy that Australia did so swiftly after Federation.

But according to Windschuttle, the idea that the Australian Commonwealth rested on inherently "racist" foundations lacks an empirical basis and is a myth. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Social Darwinism enjoyed little real support in mainstream Australia, and was only subscribed to by a small and largely marginalised group of intellectuals on the political fringe. Moreover, close analysis of the speeches delivered during the Immigration Restriction Bill debate reveals that biological racism played little part in the thinking of most Australian politicians. While a minority advanced biologically racist arguments, most supported a White Australia for cultural and for progressive economic and political reasons.

Australian politicians wanted to protect the living standards of white workers from the cheap competition of servile "coolie" labourers. They also wanted to exclude alien races whose inimical political customs and traditions would render them into an underclass unable to adapt to the egalitarian liberal democratic form of government that was the Australian ideal. This was civic patriotism, not racist nationalism. This was also the reason why the Australian government was gradually able to end the White Australia policy between 1947 and 1973 without cultural upheaval.

Windschuttle concludes that the easy transition to a non-discriminatory immigration policy could not have occurred had proto-Nazi racism been the force in Australian history that academic historians claim it was. Therefore, their further claim that the shameful racist legacy of White Australia continues to stain the Australian soul (witness the 2001 "Tampa" federal election) is absurd.

Windschuttle discredits the academic consensus by recovering an explanation of the ethnocentric origins of the White Australia policy that was widely accepted before 1970, and which first appeared in Myra Willard's History of the White Australia Policy in 1923. From the mid-nineteenth century, leading Australian politicians had recognised the vast cultural differences that separated white and non-white races, which they attributed to their different stages of historical development as opposed to any inherent biological inferiority. But since the customs and traditions of Australia were so dissimilar to those of non-European peoples, Australian elites were convinced that the barring of alien immigration was essential to preserve the country's homogenous character. Keen to preserve and foster the advanced democratic qualities of Australian society, they wanted to protect Australia from the social divisions and political problems that an unassimilated racial minority would create.

The White Australia Policy gives new force to this argument. Windschuttle is the first historian who has comprehensively examined the range of arguments that members of parliament cited both for and against the Immigration Restriction Bill during the 1901 debate. To emphasise the cultural arguments that he says enjoyed the most support in parliament, he especially highlights those speakers from across the political spectrum whose speeches repudiated the biologically racist arguments that a minority of their colleagues employed.

Hence we learn that while the leader of the Protectionist party, Prime Minister Edmund Barton, said that the so-called "inferiority" of alien races required their exclusion from the Commonwealth, his Attorney General, the Victorian Protectionist liberal Alfred Deakin, expressly denied that a belief in white superiority formed the basis of the Bill. Drawing a careful distinction between matters of race and culture, and refusing to judge alien societies, Deakin said that it was not necessary to insult Asian countries (especially Japan) by reflecting offensively upon the "inferior" character and customs of non-white peoples. It was enough to say simply that the differences between their cultures prevented the races from mixing.