The Press TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1949. White Australia

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25735, 22 February 1949, Page 4

The Press TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1949. White Australia

In his broadcast defence of the White Australia policy, reported in the cables this morning, Mr A. A. Calwell, the Minister of Immigration. has attempted a tactical diversion. He has attempted to draw discussion to the general principles of the policy, which are not being attacked and therefore need no defence, and away from his callous, tactless, and blundering administration of the policy, which is under hot attack and is indefensible. And he has done this by appealing to the least creditable political, economic, and racial prejudices of his countrymen.

The only people who want to water down the White Australia policy [said Mr Calwell] are graziers, extremists of the Right and Left, and silly sentimentalists. They want to return to the good old days of kanaka labour. . . . The only Asiatics who are interested in our immigration policy are political agitators. . .We are eager to meet our obligation to help the people of Asia raise their own living standards, but we would not be helping Asiatic nations if we took 20.000. 30.000. or even 40.000 people from their teeming millions. Before long, Australia would become a Eurasian nation, with its coloured people no better off than in their native lands, and its whites reduced to poverty, except for a ruthless few.

To understand how false is this appeal to fear, it is necessary only to look at the grounds cn which the administration of the White Australia policy is being attacked. Almost no one in Australia .wants the door opened wide; but an increasing number of sober and responsible Australians realise that the door slammed shut and locked and barred is an affront to the dignity of coloured peoples. They realise that these peoples, who are achieving or have recently achieved independent nationhood, regard themselves as the equals of the citizens of any other nation, and are deeply affronted by being excluded, because of the colour of their skins, from a country which is combing the world for immigrants—provided they are white. Australians who dislike this invidious policy see the remedy in a quota system of coloured immigration. They emphasise that the annual quotas for each ethnic group need, be no more than “token” numbers. So long as a few coloured immigrants are admitted to Australian citizenship each year, the Eastern countries will not feel that they are shut out because of their colour and because colour is believed to connote inferiority. It is, of course, little more than a gesture. It can have little or no significant effect, in the short run or the long, on the composition of the Australian population. If this is “watering down” the White Australia policy, it is a dilution so mild that it can be likened to the effect of a bucket ‘of fresh water in the Pacific Ocean. It is far from inundation by the “ Asiatic hordes ” about which Mr Calwell rants; and its result would certainly not be “a mongrel Australia”—again his own tactful words.

But Mr : Calwell, his department, and the Federal Government 'gre not being attacked for refusing to let a few Asiatic immigrants into the Commonwealth each year. They are being attacked for driving out of the country the remnants of the few thousand coloured refugees who were admitted during the war. Most of those who remain have formed attachments and have taken root. The case of Mrs O’Keefe and her family is not untypical. That these people should all be uprooted and deported, as a matter of cold departmental routine, without regard for circumstances, has become, as the “ Sydney Morning Herald ” remarked recently, a grave reflection on administrative common sense. Neither the brutal treatment of individuals nor the further humiliation of the East Asiatic peoples which is implicit in the Federal Government’s handling of the O’Keefe case can be justified or excused by the extravagant nonsense Mr Calwell has poured into the microphone.