What was the White Australia policy?

From the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 until the government of Gough Whitlam in 1973, the “White Australia” policy was in place. Following earlier restrictions enacted by individual colonies, under White Australia, all non-white immigration was in effect banned. Around 7,500 Pacific Islander people who already resided in Australia before 1901 were also deported, many having been kidnapped or misled into servitude on Queensland’s sugar cane fields.

Adopted unanimously by the new Australian parliament in 1901 as one of its first legal enactments, the Immigration Restriction Act was the cornerstone of White Australia. The act used a dictation test in a “European language” at the discretion of the Immigration Department to bar anyone not deemed white enough. The Australian Labor Party, far from opposing White Australia, was its most vociferous champion for much of its history. In 1901, the ALP moved amendments to the act to ban Asians outright, making it explicitly racist.

The White Australia policy in common history is presented as a national shame representing the backwardness and bigotry of the past. The National Museum of Australia, for example, says of the period that “many White Australians feared that non-white immigrants would threaten Australian society”.

White Australia has come up recently, the Nazis behind the “March for Australia” justifying their racist dreams of ethnic cleansing by referring to this supposedly glorious past. Support for the policy has remained a touchstone for the Australian far right, from Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech in parliament in 1997 to Fraser Anning’s in 2018. Whether viewed with horror or nostalgia, the consensus is that “White Australia” reflected the wishes of most people in Australia.

The reality is that White Australia was the product, not of an irrational fear or some broad conservatism among “white Australians”, but of the interests of a new capitalist state operating as a European outpost in Asia. White Australia was formulated by the nation’s leading liberals and humanitarian reformers of the late nineteenth century, who pitched it as “progressive” and “democratic”.

Two main elements drove it: First, the emerging Australian ruling class desired to create a unified and independent state, and second, it wanted to build this state in Asia, facing competition from rapidly industrialising and expansionist Japan.

No ruling class can rule without maintaining “hegemony”, which means presenting the interests of the ruling class as those of the whole of society. The Chinese emperors had the “mandate of heaven”, European feudal monarchies had the “divine right of kings”, and modern capitalism rules under the pretence of the “will of the people” and the “national interest”. Just as older ideas justified the social position of nobles and kings, the notion that capitalism is governed “democratically” or that the “national interest” represents everyone serves to maintain capitalist rule today.

Australia’s colonial ruling class, which developed over the nineteenth century as Australia ceased being just a dumping ground for convicts, viewed White Australia as central to a national and “democratic” ideology for the new state.

Alfred Deakin, the first attorney-general and prime minister on and off from 1903 to 1910, explained that White Australia “was the note that touched particularly the Australian born, who felt themselves endowed with a heritage not only of political freedom, but of an ample area within which the race might expand, and an obligation consequent upon such an endowment—the obligation to pass on to their children and the generations after them that territory undiminished and uninvaded”.

The Australian ruling class understood that “White Australia” bound the interests of workers and bosses together, forging a common nationality. The idea that being “white” was a sign of civilisation pitted white workers against foreigners and helped to butter up the populace ideologically for Australia’s own expansionism in the Pacific, under the guise of “national defence”. Alfred Deakin, again:

“Coloured aliens engaging in any occupation subject white men in the same occupation to an utterly unfair and improper competition. The secret of the coloured man’s success was his complete indifference to the moral and social standards of his white fellow citizens. He worked from dawn to dark on seven days a week, he ate little else than rice, he clothed himself in rags, he lived in a hovel. White men through no fault of their own would be driven from employment and production, simply because they adhered to the most elementary ideals of a civilised society.”

It was argued by liberals—including much of the leadership of the Australian Labor Party and the trade unions—that building Australia as a “homogeneous community” of white civilization would preserve its supposed great qualities. By excluding non-white immigrants, mainly Chinese people who tried to immigrate during the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes, Australia would avoid the problems seen in countries like the United States, where importing African people as slaves led to civil war and segregation.

The ALP’s first federal objective was White Australia, supported in these liberal terms: “The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community”.

When modern liberals explain the White Australia policy, they often claim that ALP and union support meant a genuine working-class interest. For example, Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake, in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, suggest achievements like protectionism, industrial arbitration and the basic wage (what we today call the minimum wage) were the fruit of White Australia, benefiting (white, male) workers.

But immigration restrictions, past or present, do not benefit workers. White Australia’s purpose was to create a false “national interest” that in reality propped up bosses’ authority and power.

Protectionism—using tariffs to protect domestic industry—was justified as necessary for high wages, much as we hear today that higher wages depend on bosses’ profits. This means workers pay more for basics, as US workers now see under President Trump.

Arbitration was favoured not just by the ALP and union officials but also by most of the bosses. Capitalists backed arbitration (and still do, as with the Fair Work Commission), because it limits workers’ ability to strike and regulates disputes, hoping to avoid large strikes like those in Australia in the 1890s.

The basic wage, which Reynolds and Lake describe as challenging employer power, wasn’t a product of White Australia any more than similar minimum wages abroad. The minimum wage set what a family could survive on—the literal minimum—and paid accordingly. As socialists said at the time, “There is nothing radical about recognising that human beings require the same as a donkey—enough to live on”.

Arguments blaming the working class for White Australia haven’t changed much in over a hundred years. The only difference: liberals back then believed in White Australia to build an “enlightened and self-reliant community”; today liberals still claim it benefited workers, and try to ascribe responsibility for such blatant racism and discrimination not to their own political forerunners, but to “unenlightened” workers.

Besides providing the early Australian state with an ideology that could bind its population together, White Australia was also necessary because the Australian state confronted a rising Asian power in Japan.

Australia was always an aggressive power, pushing for Britain’s and the US’s involvement in the Pacific and Asia. Australia urged Britain to annex Fiji in 1874; Queensland annexed Papua New Guinea in 1884. During the Cold War, Australian governments supported US intervention in Vietnam and applauded the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. This aggressive imperialism continues today, with Labor spending huge sums on nuclear-powered attack submarines as part of the US war drive against China.

While the fear is now about China, for most of the twentieth century it was Japan. From 1894, when Japan annexed Korea and embarked on its own colonial expansion, it was perceived as Australia’s key rival in the region. This view grew after Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905, the first modern defeat of a European empire by a non-European state. The rise of Japanese imperialism was perceived as a threat to Australia’s capacity to develop as a white state. As George Pearce, Labor senator and later defence minister in World War One, put it: “The only doctrine that these [Asiatic] races respect is the doctrine of force. Our White Australian legislation is so much waste paper unless we have rifles to back it up”.

Despite fighting alongside Japan in World War One, Australia strongly opposed and defeated Japanese efforts to have the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) support racial equality.

By the time Australia went to war with Japan in 1941, the ideological groundwork was done. Sydney Daily Telegraph headlines in 1933 said that “war with Japan is inevitable”, despite Japan being Australia’s second largest export market behind Britain, absorbing 12 percent of all exports. The parallels with China today are clear.

Racist vilification of Japanese people—always central to the White Australia policy—was pushed to extremes in World War Two. A two-week campaign started by the government claimed Japanese people were warlike fanatics, possessed by an irrational hatred of whites:

“The Japs have been educated to hate you from infancy. They have been preparing for a war like this since they were old enough to understand ... Even when they smiled on us and treated us ever so politely they hated us in their souls ... Young Japan learnt to hate while you were playing with marbles and enjoying the freedom and benefits of your democracy.”

This systematic campaign of dehumanisation was summed up in the slogan: “We’ve always despised them, NOW WE MUST SMASH THEM!”

In the Pacific War, this race hatred played out fully: Japanese soldiers were often executed instead of being taken prisoner, Japanese civilians were killed in the hundreds of thousands by US firebombing, and ultimately, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by nuclear weapons.

The White Australia policy is neither a glorious page in the nation’s past nor merely a symbol of ignorance. It was a deliberate effort by Australian rulers to manufacture nationalism and unity in a new state; a barbaric, dehumanising ideology to replace class struggle with racial hatred for imperialist aims. It stands as another mark of shame in the history of capitalism in Australia.