Becoming Australian

Migration, Settlement and Citizenship

Brian Galligan, Martina Boese, Melissa Phillips

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780522866377
• eBook ISBN: 9780522866384
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

The year 2013 is the 40th anniversary of the end of the 'White Australia policy'. In these four decades Australia's immigration policy has shifted from a primary concern with cultural homogeneity or Britishness to a focus on demand-based skills through an increasingly fine-tuned system of points tests, occupation lists and employer-sponsored visas.Despite disproportionate politicisation of asylum seekers in recent public discourse, the intake of refugees and humanitarian entrants has remained relatively small. While Australia's contemporary migrant and refugee intake is truly multicultural, and governments continue to adhere to an official multicultural policy, integration into the Australian community and culture has been the dominant process, especially for second and third generation Australians. Australian identity and citizenship have changed in the last forty years, making Australia and its people more pluralistic and richly diverse. Becoming Australian focuses on the ways in which migrants and refugees meet the challenges of 'becoming Australian' and the transformative process for Australia and its people as they incorporate the continuing influx of multicultural peoples.

1
Making the Australian Nation

Australia was first settled by the British more than two hundred years ago in 1788, and founded as a nation more than one hundred years ago in 1901. Along with New Zealand, Australia was a relatively new settler society compared with the United States, Canada and South Africa where European settlement began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a more recent and homogeneous fragment of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain, with convict and free settlers drawn from the cities and regions of Britain in the throes of the Industrial Revolution.1 If the convict regime was harsh and often petty, it was also infused by the British rule of law that protected basic life and property. Transportation and penal servitude were terrible impositions that maimed and destroyed some, but many others found increased opportunities for economic advantage and social inclusion in a new settler society that would have been impossible in the old country. Transported convicts included many young adults who had committed minor offenses of stealing food or clothing, and were broadly representative of middling and lower British society. Free settlers included adventurers, entrepreneurs and dreamers, along with those who had little to lose and potentially much to gain from migrating to the new Australian colonies.2 British government policy and state authority controlled both convict and free settlement, and took special measures to encourage women and families though assisted passage. Throughout the nineteenth century, assisted migrants were a decisive majority despite the huge upsurge of ‘diggers’ who paid their own way during the gold rushes.

Of course, Australia was already settled by Indigenous people, Australian Aborigines, who had occupied the country for at least forty thousand years, which is the limit for dating techniques. British settlement was a prolonged tragedy for Indigenous Australians, who were dispossessed of their land and afflicted by European diseases for which they had little resistance. The official policy of ‘terra nullius’—land of no one, or no one who had the kind of title that the British authorities would recognise—denied Indigenous peoples’ traditional ownership and usage rights. The doctrine of terra nullius would not be overturned until the famous Mabo case in 1992 when the High Court ruled that it was discriminatory, and that a limited ‘native title’ still existed where it had not been extinguished by governments, and provided that Indigenous people retained an unbroken association with their land. This applied in isolated pockets such as the Murray Island where Eddie Mabo’s land was located, but more importantly, it applied across the vast pastoral leases of northern and western Australia, as the Wik case decided in 1996. Mabo, however, was too little and far too late to save Aboriginal land. ‘Settler sovereignty’3 had imposed British law and practice as settlers quickly fanned out from the original convict and free settlements around coastal Australia, displacing Indigenous people or incorporating them into colonial society. Despite sporadic resistance that was readily suppressed by superior force, Aboriginal people were dispossessed, and remnant groups were pushed to the fringes of white settler society. Australia’s Indigenous people became ‘citizens without rights’ in their own country4; their treatment is a shameful part of Australia’s British settlement and foundation as a ‘White Australian’ nation.

The focus of this book is not primarily on early settlement and settler society, with its defining combination of British convict and free settlers discarding and displacing Aboriginal peoples. These subjects have been extensively researched, and there is a large literature that has changed Australian public discourse and sentiment. Convict ancestry is now considered a badge of distinction, as is Aboriginal descent and heritage. Indigenous dispossession and discrimination have been recognised and addressed, albeit with limited success, through legal changes such as Mabo, anti-discrimination laws, a national apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007, and a range of Commonwealth and state and territory policies. Early British settlement and dispossession of Indigenous people were inter-related components that shaped colonial development through the nineteenth century and the foundation of the Australian nation. Our focus is the latter: the establishment of the Australian nation in the twentieth century, and in particular the migrant strand, which is a defining part.

Australian Settlement

‘Constitutional settlement’ and ‘Australian settlement’ have been commonly used in past discussions of Australian political history and culture, but not usually combined. ‘Constitutional settlement’ is typically used to refer to the political process of constitution making that resulted in the adoption of the constitution in 1901. ‘Australian settlement’ has been a handy way of referring to the set of national policies that were adopted by the early Commonwealth parliament and shaped the development of the Australian nation through the first half of the twentieth century. The key ones were the inter-linked policies of immigration, protection and arbitration, and the large and activist role of government, often called ‘state socialism’ by early commentators. This usage has been broadened by recent scholars to include other key aspects of Australian political history and thinking.5 We use the term ‘Australian settlement’ as a broad and encompassing one to include both the constitutional settlement of 1901, and the set of national policies put in place in the decades after Federation, as well as the political and economic thinking that informed this nation building.

Bringing together the constitutional and national policy aspects, as well as the political thinking that underlies them, allows for a more comprehensive discussion of the foundation and consolidation of the Australian nation. The constitution was not adopted for its own sake, but in order to create an ‘indissoluble Federal Commonwealth’ with institutions that could implement major policies for developing the new federal Commonwealth. Political and economic thinking of the time informed both the constitution and national policies, and are important for understanding the shape they took. Our perspective combines all of these elements and might properly be called constitutional political economy. The constitution was the institutional framework for the foundation of the Australian nation that drew upon the political economy thinking of the time, and enabled subsequent nation building that embodied that same political economy thinking in the Australian settlement.

The Australian settlement and its discussion in this chapter provide the larger canvas for migration, settlement or settling in, and citizenship, which are the main focus of this book. Migration has always been a key component of the Australian settlement, both old and new. The migrant story has these three major components: migrating to Australia, settling into Australian society, and becoming citizens, each of which is addressed in subsequent chapters. Migrants used to be called ‘New Australians’ in the 1950s and 1960s, but that expression has fallen out of usage. Now migrants settle in and many become Australian. The types of migrants coming to Australia have always been a key component of the Australian settlement, reflecting immigration policy and contributing to national identity: predominantly British until after World War II, then expanded to European in the postwar decades, and increasingly Asian from the 1970s. Australian migration has always had dual political and economic purposes: to increase the population of a vast continent with people who would make good liberal democratic citizens; and to boost the national workforce with suitable workers. Australian governments selected not just any people and workers, but those who fitted its political and economic requirements with the attributes for becoming part of ‘Australia and its people’. These desired attributes have changed substantially over time.

One of the most significant set of changes has been to the traditional Australian settlement. Australian political economy has changed towards marketisation and deregulation, which eschews protection and arbitration, and a more limited ‘managerial’ role for government. All of the key planks of the traditional Australian settlement have been abandoned or changed as national policy-makers adopted market solutions of greater competition and direct wage negotiation, replacing protection of domestic manufacturing industry by high tariffs and wage fixing through an elaborate system of national arbitration. These were phased out with the opening up of the Australian economy in the 1980s under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. The role of government was wound back from extensive ownership of infrastructure and provision of services through extensive privatisation and more streamlined ‘new management’ techniques. The only major policy retained was extensive immigration, but that changed from traditional ‘White Australia’ to open selection based mainly on marketable skills.

Despite such changes, there is obvious continuity, reflected in Australia’s continuing constitutional settlement and geography, as well as aspects of tradition and culture. At the same time these too have changed. The constitution has developed a centralised federation favouring a powerful Commonwealth or national government. Australian is now a highly developed Western democracy whose people are far more numerous, better educated, highly skilled and diverse than a century ago. Migration remains a vital part of modern Australia, with migrants selected, for the most part, for the qualities and skills they bring, regardless of their ethnic background or colour.

Australia of the early twentieth century was predominantly British and white, but this changed significantly with large European migration from the late 1940s. While migration from non-British European countries was changing the cultural mix, if not the colour, of Australians, Britishness was still formally celebrated, and assimilation promoted into the 1960s. This changed as White Australia was dismantled and Asians were included in an increasingly skill-based migration program. Australia’s migration intake has become thoroughly multicultural, and Australia’s national identity has changed. What Australian identity is, and how it has changed, are large and contentious issues. Multiculturalism is officially endorsed and championed by some as preferable to assimilation, but neither term captures the complex character of modern Australia. We reserve the term ‘multiculturalism’ for describing the migrant intake—people drawn from many cultural and ethnic groups, which is its literal meaning. National identity and multiculturalism as a preferred national descriptor are discussed in detail in Chapter 7.

The negative shibboleth for multiculturalism as a national descriptor is ‘assimilation’. Although current in international, and particularly American, discourse, the term has a bad reputation in Australia. It is worth noting, however, that assimilation did not always mean the monocultural straitjacket that critics often assume. In addressing the 1962 Australian Citizenship Convention, a major annual gathering to celebrate migration and review migration issues, Sir Robert Menzies summed up the expected transformative change of postwar migration:

It is seldom in Australia that you can get the great political parties—the great political bodies of thought—to coincide precisely on some topic, but on migration we are as one. The great movement of migration which began in substance after the war was created by the Labor administration and has been carried on by my own. It has, up to a point, changed the face of Australia, and it will continue to have the most profound effects on the intellectual development, the cultural standards, the scientific achievements, and the social consciousness of people in Australia.

We will, in 50 years’ time, be a different people—not detached from our old anchors, not detached from our old traditions, but enriched by new ones. We will be a different people—I believe, a dynamic people—a people with much to contribute to the world.6

Menzies continued this theme the following year in his address to the 1963 Citizenship Convention titled ‘We Are a Changing Community’. He used the word ‘assimilation’ as if by habit, but pointed out it was a ‘wretched word’, and that ‘the assimilating body itself is not static’. Menzies insisted that Australia was changing:

the receiving body, the total Australian people had itself changed materially … So year by year, decade by decade, it has become a remarkably new community … We must realise that, although some of us as individuals may not have changed very much, Australia as a community is experiencing a sea change into something rich and strange.7

Arthur Calwell, the Labor architect of expanded postwar migration and Opposition leader by 1963, spoke on a similar theme using a different metaphor: ‘[T]his country needed a biological transformation’, he said, ‘we were becoming a little too inbred’.8

The period of the early 1960s was a transitional one. Fifty years earlier the traditional Australian settlement based on a political economy to ensure White Australia was being put in place. Fifty years later Australia had changed into a pluralistic modern nation with a highly multicultural and multiracial immigration policy. National leaders like Menzies and Calwell were staunchly traditional Australians who, as Menzies admitted, may not have changed much as individuals. Both were born in the 1890s, Menzies in 1894 and Calwell in 1896; and both played major roles in shaping postwar Australia. Calwell was the first and most influential Australian minister for immigration, expanding migration to unprecedented levels and from diverse European countries, and was a senior Labor figure and Opposition leader from 1960 to 1967. Menzies was Australia’s longest serving prime minister, from 1939 to 1941 and, after founding the modern Liberal Party, from 1949 to 1966. While critics might paint them as assimilationists and Menzies as archly British, they redirected migration and welcomed the changes to traditional Australia that would result. Australia was changing into ‘something rich and strange’ because of the migration policy they developed and promoted. Our point in citing these old champions of migration is to illustrate the complexity of migration policy and the developmental character of change that typically combines elements of the old and new. Understanding modern Australia is enhanced by an appreciation of the original Australian settlement that is the focus of the rest of this chapter.

White Australia

The defining characteristic of the old Australian settlement, from a nationality and migration perspective, was the White Australia policy.9 According to modern critics, racism was the core of Australia’s early immigration policy and its nationalism. Laksiri Jayasuriya, a prominent scholar and critic, marshals the evidence and argument for a primarily racist interpretation in a recent book, Transforming a ‘White Australian’: Issues of Racism and Immigration. He argues that the rationale, ethos and characteristics of Australian racism are to be found in ‘anglo-racism’ which he defines as ‘the racist ideology, beliefs and attitudes and racist practices that derive from the circumstances of the founding of Australia’.10 British racism, according to this critical view, was particularly centred on race and skin colour, more so than that of the French who were much more ‘colourblind’ and ‘cultural’ in their ethnic relations. In settling their colonies, the British brought their racism with them, and this racism infused the new culture of settler societies: ‘British racial ideology when transported to settler societies was based exclusively on nineteenth century doctrines of racism’.11

While the White Australia policy had a strong racial component, and no doubt for some was buttressed by racism and social Darwinism, this was not its primary motivation or purpose. There were strong political reasons for such a policy, articulated by the leading po...

Table of contents

• Becoming Australian
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 Making the Australian Nation
• 2 Pre-migration
• 3 Migration
• 4 Settlement
• 5 Employment
• 6 Citizenship
• 7 Australia and Its People
• Appendix 1 Research Project and Methodology
• Appendix 2 Migrant and Refugee Interview Participants
• Notes
• References
• Index