Australia Streamlines Entry Of Migrants

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28491, 22 January 1958, Page 11

Australia Streamlines Entry Of Migrants

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) CANBERRA, January 21. Australia’s notorious dictation test for unwanted immigrants is to be abolished. This was announced to the Australian Citizenship Convention which opened today by the Minister for Immigration, Mr Athol Townley.

Mr Townley said the abolition of the dictation test would be included in a complete revision of the Immigration Acts which he would ask Parliament to consider later this year.

The dictation test would be replaced by a streamline system of simple entry permits. For the last 57 years the dictation test has been used in a series of controversial political cases to exclude certain immigrants and visitors from Australia.

As the immigration laws now I stand, a person can be excluded' from Australia on the pretext of! education ineligibility. Educational eligibility is determined by a dictation test which may be given in any language selected by the Department of Immigration. If a person fails in the test he can be prevented from remaining in the country. Mr Townley said that a new section of the act would provide simple and streamlined machinery for controlling admittance to Australia. Under the new rule,, if it had been decided that a person should be permitted to land in Australia, he would have an entry permit stamped on his passport on arrival.

If a person was to be kept out, ail that would be necessary would be to withold this stamp. Mr Townley told the convention that of the 115,000 migrants to be received this year, 63.000 would come on assisted passages and 52,000 would be settlers who paid their own fares. Of the assisted migrants. 30.000 would be from the United Kingdom, a total of 6000 more than the British arrivals last yearThe Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, told more than 250 delegates from all states that history would assess the migration programme upon which Australia was engaged as the biggest project of nation building for Australia in this century.

It had been one of the glories of Australia in the years which had followed the war that in spite of lively differences on so many other major matters, migration had been a huge national policy on which there had been no party divisions and no basic differences of opinion. The president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Mr A. E. Monk, said: “The immigration intake of workers should be regulated to meet the employment situation in Australia, but we should avoid ill-considered, precipitate action which would mean discontinuing those other parts of the immigration programme which contributed to real population building. “If the level of recruitment of Commonwealth - nominated migrants from the United Kingdom could be stepped up without departing from the standards and criteria that had been established, no-one would support this action more than myself,” Mr Monk said. But he did not belong to the school of thought that believed because a person or thing was British, he or it was automatically good. Careful selection of tradesmen from the United Kingdom was just as important as it was elsewhere.

Plot For Sumatra Government

(Rec. 9 p.m.) JAKARTA, January 20.

The Indonesian Army chief of staff. Major-General Nasution, said today that the Army had documents proving the existence of a plan to proclaim a new State or Government in Sumatra, according to the British United Press.

He said that the plan did not have the support of a majority of the people. He nameo Colonel Zukifli Lubis as the author of the plan.