Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Australia

Gillian Bottomley, Marie De Lepervanche, Marie de Lepervanche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000257014
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Australia is a major study of the impact of immigration on Australian society, and of the fragmentation that has developed along ethnic, class and gender lines. Rather than thumbnail sketches of ethnic groups or celebrations of multiculturalism, it offers detailed critiques of policy and practice, backed up by evidence from the experiences and research of the authors.

This book confronts issues crucial to all Australians: the increasing fragmentation of the workforce; the class, gender and origin-based inequalities present in an 'egalitarian' country; and the ideologies, from racism to multiculturalism, designed to mask these inequalities.

The authors also point to evidence of growing resistance to the status quo, and strategies for working towards a more genuine equality - to more positive education programmes, to political action at the workplace and beyond. The aim is to broaden readers' understanding of Australian society by including those who are so often omitted from analysis of that society.

1
Immigration and class: the Australian experience

JOCK COLLINS

There is general agreement among students of Australian society that immigration has had a significant impact on all aspects of Australian life in the sphere of economic activity, cultural development, political change, the attitudes and ideologies of the Australian people and within the major institutions of Australian society. Indeed, the post-war Australian immigration programme is directly responsible for one in three Australians today, if the children of post-war migrants are included. That such a large influx of people, in such a short period of time and from such a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds, has left an indelible imprint on contemporary Australian capitalism is beyond doubt and debate. What is debated, though, is the way in which the impact of Australian immigration is evaluated and explained.

There is now a large and growing body of literature that describes and explains the Australian immigration experience (e.g. Price 1966, 1970, 1979 and Price and Martin 1975). The concerns of this research range from the evaluation of migrants and immigration in general terms, to specific studies of ethnic groups and regional, religious and political subsets within these ethnic groups. There is, however, a common tendency in most of these studies: they derive from the methodological concerns of the conservative or orthodox social sciences. This is not surprising, given the long-held and entrenched dominance of conservatism throughout Australian tertiary institutions and research bodies.

On the fringes of this orthodoxy are those who attempt to analyse the ‘migrant presence’ in Australia—to use the term of the late Jean Martin—from a Marxist perspective. Marxists are critical of the narrow ‘ideological blinkers’ of the conservative social sciences, of the ahistorical and individualist methodology that often views capitalist society as harmonious, classless and egalitarian. To understand Australian immigration fully, it is important to start with class analysis: to stress the specificity of the capitalist social relations inter-nationally and nationally that lie behind the Australian immigration process, and which in turn are changed by immigration.

This chapter aims to further the understanding of Australian immigration from a Marxist perspective. Building on previous work (Collins 1975, 1978 and 1981), I argue that it is important to engage in the debates concerning the usefulness of a Marxist analysis of Australian immigration, and that it is necessary to extend previous Marxist assessments of immigration and migrants in Australia.

Any inquiry into Australian immigration is difficult, if only because of the enormous scope of the task. As immigration has affected all aspects of contemporary Australian society, it is necessary therefore to confine analysis to manageable levels. One useful way of doing this is to consider the immigration experience from four key areas and then investigate one contentious debate within each of these.

For the purpose of this investigation the key concerns in the study of Australian immigration can be approached through a series of questions. The first concerns the issue: ‘why immigration?’ The second is: ‘what is the impact of immigration on Australian society?’ Third is the often neglected question: ‘what is the impact on the lives of the migrants themselves?’ Finally, it is important to inquire as to the role of the capitalist state in the immigration process.

Why immigration?

The key debate in the Australian literature concerning this question relates to the Marxist concept of the reserve army of labour. 1 have argued (Collins 1975) that Australia has been historically dependent on immigration because it has been unable to generate sufficient labour reserves ‘internally’ to satisfy labour requirements during periods of economic boom. Migrants were therefore seen as an imported reserve army of labour, and it was this labour supply function of immigration that provided the overriding explanation for Australian immigration since settlement. This analysis has come under attack from both Marxists and non-Marxists. In answer to these critics, this paper argues that it is crucial to retain the notion of the reserve army of labour if we are to understand the immigration experience, although this notion requires some clarification and refinement.

The departing point of Marxist analysis is that in capitalist society class relations and class conflict provide the key dynamic. It makes sense therefore to inquire into the impact of immigration on the process of class formation and on class relations in Australian society. To date, this has been attempted for the working class (Collins 1978) but not for the other classes of Australian capitalism. This paper aims therefore to extend the assessment of immigration on class formation in Australia and to examine its impact on the ruling class and on the ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle classes of Australian society.

On the matter of how migrants fare in the ‘lucky country’ (Collins 1981), one relevant and contentious aspect of this question concerns the impact of the current economic recession on migrants generally. A common thread in the conservative literature is that they are not disproportionately disadvantaged. This chapter will argue to the contrary that non English-speaking migrants have borne the brunt of the current economic recession.

Finally, it is clear that the state in Australia has been central to the immigration experience. The state bureaucracy organises and underwrites the immigration programme, determines target intakes and administers policies for migrants on arrival. For most of the period since economic recession hit Australia in the mid-1970s, the immigration policy has been administered by the conservative Fraser government. It will be useful therefore to assess the Fraser policy on the size and composition of the migrant intake, and to assess the changes in the brief period since the Hawke government took office.

It is clear that while these issues are but a part of the totality of the immigration issue in Australia, a focus on them highlights the difference between Marxist analysis and the entrenched orthodoxy. The questions raised in this chapter will be treated separately, although they are of course interrelated and interdependent. In charting the general thrust of Marxist analysis of Australian immigration, the chapter also attempts to point to the need for further study and clarification within the Marxist perspective: this contribution is suggestive rather than definitive.

In An Issue of People (1981) Birrell and Birrell use a ‘straw man’ technique to demonstrate the futility of the reserve army concept. They define the reserve army thesis as follows: ‘Australian capitalists desire access to a reserve army of workers in order to keep down the costs of labour and immigration has served this function. The more or less explicit imputation is that migrants were recruited here primarily for this purpose’ (p.32: emphasis added). They refer at length to the position of ‘southern migrants’—that is non English-speaking migrants—recognising that they hold the dirtiest, hardest, most monotonous and lowest paid jobs in Australia. They then devote the central chapters of their book to answering the question: ‘what evidence is there that Australian employers did seek out Southern migrant workers, and is this the most plausible explanation for the recruitment of workers or should more account be taken of the Government’s population building goals?’ (p.39)

In other words the Marxist explanation of Australian immigration—the reserve army thesis—is reduced to conspiracy theory. If it can be demonstrated that the ‘captains of industry’ did not sit around with their lackeys in government in smoky rooms some 40 years ago to mastermind a plan to introduce southern migrants, exploit them, and divide the working class, then the Marxist interpretations of Australian immigration hold no water. Like all straw men, this caricature of Marxism and its application to the Australian immigration experience, when set aright, is reduced to a bundle of ashes.

The ethnic composition of the post-war migrants gives the lie to conspiracy. Calwell, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration, was keen to continue the tradition of excluding non-whites: when announcing the post-war target of population increase through immigration—1 per cent of total population per year—he stressed that the White Australia Policy would be retained: ‘for every foreign migrant there will be ten people from the United Kingdom’ (Collins 1975:10). Nevertheless, Calwel’s plan to maintain racial purity in Australia through a careful migrant selection procedure failed not by design but by default. From the so-called ‘Baltic Refugees’ from Eastern Europe immediately after the war, through to the Northern and Southern Europeans and later those from the Middle East, Latin America and finally South East Asia, Australia’s post-war settlers were drawn from many non-British countries to fill its immigration targets. By 1981 only 37.7 per cent of Australia’s foreign-born population were British. There was no conspiracy. Indeed capitalism does not often work in conspiracies: the capitalist state is not a mere puppet of the ruling class. Rather, the need to fill immigration targets overrode the perceived need to maintain racial purity in Australia, as these two objectives of the post-war immigration programme were clearly inconsistent.

The question ‘why immigration?’ is therefore reduced to ‘why did Australia require such large additions to its population, irrespective of the ethnic origin of these migrants?’ One answer to this comes from Birrell and Birrell who point to past statements of politicians and business men on the one hand and to the push of the ‘immigration lobby’ on the other. Such evidence, according to these authors, contradicts the notion of migrants as a reserve army of labour, as these statements did not mention the need ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1 Immigration and class: the Australian experience
• 2 Ethnicity, multiculturalism and neo-conservatism
• 3 The ‘naturalness’ of inequality
• 4 Migrantness, culture and ideology
• 5 Multiculturalism and education policy
• 6 Women on the move: migration and feminism
• 7 Non English-speaking women: production and social reproduction
• 8 A new Australian working class leadership: the case of Ford Broadmeadows
• 9 Migrant communities and class politics: the Greek community in Australia
• 10 Generations and class: Sicilian-Australians in Melbourne
• 11 Religion, law and family disputes in a Lebanese Muslim community in Sydney
• Bibliography
• Index