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Since there was a modicum of interest in my ramblings here is the full text of the piece by George Megalogenis. Edifying reading. The challenge of history is there do we slam the door and stagnant or do we tackle the challenges of an ageing population?
Then again he's from a migrant family. It could be group think.
��
Then again he's from a migrant family. It could be group think.
��Open door holds the key to prosperity
Experience shows us that Australia’s migration anxiety is misplaced
- The Weekend Australian
- 19 September 2015
- GEORGE MEGALOGENIS
In the 21st century Australia staged one of the great recoveries in human history: from a nation to be pitied to one that is considered the envy of the world. No other economy has had a comparable winning streak to ours, and at a time of global instability. Twentyfour years have passed since our last deep recession, and since we were subjected to the taunt from Singapore’s president Lee Kuan Yew that Australia risked becoming the “poor white trash of Asia”.Yet we no longer feel comfortable in our prosperous skins. There is a palpable fear in the community that our luck will soon run out and that we will revert to our former state of mediocrity: a people to be ridiculed for wasting their fortune.
Liberal Party pollster Mark Textor describes the surly public mood as a form of performance anxiety. “Australians realise they have been in a privileged position but feel stressed about it,” he says. “When you are sitting on an economic pedestal, you ask yourself, ‘How do I maintain this?’ The only way is down.”We have been here before. These first surprising, unsettling decades of the new millennium have brought Australians back to the position they enjoyed as the world’s richest people in the 19th century. For the second time, an entire generation of Australians has been raised with no experience of the economic or social hardship currently felt in the US or Europe.
Once again, our society reflects the best of the world back to it. In the 1870s, when Australia enjoyed its greatest advantage in living standards over the US and Britain, the population split almost 50-50 between migrants and local-born.
Today, almost half the population can be counted as first or second-generation migrants — 28 per cent were born overseas and another 20 per cent have at least one parent who was a migrant.The question of who we are has never been more fascinating, or confronting, and seldom have we been less able to discuss it. Most of us react to the subject of national identity as we do to fingernails on the blackboard.
Debate has polarised to the point where one Australia is made deliberately unrecognisable to the other. We are either irredeemably racist or the greatest people on earth. To those in the former camp it is impossible to compute Australia’s success. To those in the latter, it is un-Australian to even acknowledge the violent dispossession of the people here before us, or the revolving door of xenophobia that greets new arrivals.In our most recent period of poor performance, in the 1970s, Australia was one of the few nations to suffer rates of unemployment and inflation above 10 per cent. We had the hardest landing of any country in the global depression of the 1890s, and in the Depression of the 1930s endured the humiliation of an austerity program imposed by the Bank of England. The cuts to wages and pensions back then were as severe as the Greeks are being forced to accept today.Our national contradictions mirror the extended booms and busts of the economy. We are a confident people who can’t articulate what it is to be Australian beyond the cliches of mateship and the fair go; an affluent people pretending to be battlers.
The thread that connects the past to the present and future is the ongoing conversation between those who came to these shores and those who received them. This dialogue has always been central to the national story but it is too often reduced to its social dimensions only. The economic side of the equation is rarely considered, even though Australians would acknowledge they obsess about economics more than most people. Our blindness in this respect is a curious national trait. Americans view migration as essential to their nationhood, recognising that migrants literally made the US. Australians are more likely to define the benefits of migration in cultural terms — the food.We worry that the new arrival will not become “Australian”, while the Americans never doubt that the migrant will embrace their identity.
Our periods of strong migration have been our most successful; our busts are distinguished by the closing of our doors, through policies of racial selection and import protection. This is not to say that the new arrival is somehow superior to the local but rather that Australia’s least productive and most divisive eras have been those when migration was at its lowest ebb — in the early decades of convict settlement and in the half-century-long stagnation of White Australia, from the 1890s until the end of World War II.
Our present economic winning streak will end, as streaks always do, and there is much to be genuinely concerned about. Property prices in Sydney and Melbourne have reached levels that past experience says will lead to a crash. National politics has surrendered to its own cynicism, and China, the country that helped give Australia its extra decade of good times, can no longer be relied on to prop up the global economy.
Here is the critical challenge for Australia: whenever the next shock comes, will we revert to our old sheltered, internationally maligned self and endure another lost decade like the 70s or, worse, the isolation of White Australia? Or can we learn something from how we reacted to previous setbacks and build on the success of our longest boom?
Migration is the greatest compliment that can be paid to a nation, and for only the second time in history a significant share of skilled arrivals are choosing Australia over the US. The changes these people will bring to the nation will be more profound than those brought by the postwar waves from southern Europe and Southeast Asia.Our record of settling large numbers of people from around the world is unsurpassed. Australia’s second chance began with the postwar migration program, which sought to re-create through government planning the diversity achieved through the happy circumstance of the gold rushes a century earlier.
Within a generation it would turn the Australia John Curtin described during the war as “a British land of one race and one tongue” into a European country of many races and mother tongues.Labor MP Arthur Calwell, who became the nation’s first immigration minister, told Ben Chifley in 1944 that he was determined to create a “heterogeneous society”. “A society,” he wrote to the then treasurer, “where Irishness and Roman Catholicism would be as acceptable as Englishness and Protestantism; where an Italian background would be as acceptable as a Greek, a Dutch or any other.”Calwell’s public argument for European migration was ingenious. It took the nation’s perpetual fear of foreign invasion and reframed it. Australia would need foreigners to guard against invasion, he told parliament on August 2, 1945, in the dying days of the war in the Pacific.“We may have only (the) next 25 years in which to make the best possible use of our second chance to survive. Our first requirement is additional population. We need it for reasons of defence and for the fullest expansion of our economy. We can increase our 7,000,000 by an increased birthrate and by a policy of planned immigration within the limits of our existing legislation.”War, depression and racial selection had prematurely aged the nation. In 1947, there were 120,000 fewer boys and girls aged 10 to 24 years than there had been just 10 years earlier in 1937. Left unchecked, this shortfall would have choked an Australian reconstruction as the nation ran out of workers. There were also 110,000 fewer migrants living in Australia in 1947 than there had been at Federation, during which time the population had doubled from 3.774 million to 7.579 million.
The Labor government of Chifley had to counter trade union resistance to the entry of Europe’s displaced youth. The Liberal opposition, led by Robert Menzies, had an easier case to make because its constituency of returned servicemen and middle-class professionals was more open to migration than the workingman.The Diggers in particular were returning home with a sense of kinship with the Europeans who had resisted the naz_s. The Greeks were a particular favourite, having sheltered Australian troops.At the 1946 election, held before the effects of the postwar program were felt, voters might have detected these subtle differences in the campaign launch speeches of the two leaders.
Chifley kept up the appearance of a British bias in the program, even though the first wave of postwar migrants would contain more Italians and Germans than English and Scots.“Today Australia has become the great bastion of the British-speaking race south of the equator,” the prime minister said. “Strategically and economically, our country has assumed a position in the Pacific on behalf of the British Commonwealth of nations of such importance that development and responsibility go hand in hand.”Menzies criticised the government for not moving quickly enough to attract migrants. “It (Labor) has adopted the view that immigration is undesirable so long as we have local problems of an industrial and economic kind to solve. To this we retort that if we wait for economic perfection before building up our population we shall someday find that our lack of population has invited an attack in which our entire economy will be destroyed. Every one of us in this country is either a migrant himself or the descendant of one. We therefore, of all people, should be prepared to welcome into our community all those who can by their work and citizenship contribute to the strength of this land.”Menzies came across as the more optimistic leader, but the people stuck with the party that had seen them through the war. Labor was re-elected in September 1946 with 43 of the 75 seats in parliament — six fewer than the Curtin landslide, but with a largely unchanged primary vote of 49.7 per cent.
By its very nature, the first wave of the postwar program would seek migrants who had been displaced by conflict. There was a pressing need to provide assistance to the Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust, but this immediately hit the pothole of domestic Australian prejudice.“We are not compelled to accept the unwanted of the world at the dictate of the United Nations or anyone else,” Henry “Jo” Gullett, the Liberal member for the Melbourne electorate of Henty, told parliament in November 1946, just two months after the election.“Neither should Australia be the dumping ground for people whom Europe itself, in the course of 2000 years, has not been able to absorb. I am amazed that a Labor government, of all governments, should sponsor the kind of immigration that is going on at the present time. I am not anti-Semitic. Indeed, very few Australians are.”Yet he went on to describe “many of the Jews who came to Australia in the year before the war and since the outbreak of the war” as “notorious exploiters of labour. They set up sweatshops, and in the records of the industrial courts one may read their names. They have cornered houses and evaded income tax.”
The most vocal opponent of Jewish migration on the Left was Jack Lang, former NSW premier and now independent member for the Sydney electorate of Reid. He claimed that wealthy Jews were involved in a “refugee racket”. They used their money to gain valuable berths on migrant ships at the expense of humble British migrants. “But, as soon as anybody criticises this immigration preference, those in authority burst into tears for the poor victims of fascism. They may have been the victims of fascism. Everybody knows that there are millions and millions of victims of fascism. But only a very small proportion of those victims are wealthy and have powerful friends. Why is this government interested in these victims who are wealthy and who have powerful friends?”Gullett and Lang were minority voices in parliament. In the community, the sentiment was mixed. The NSW president of the RSL, Ken Bolton, was the dial-a-quote of his day, ready with a quick putdown of the Jew who would secure a property ahead of a returned Digger. The president of the Australian Natives Association, Joseph Lynch, said he was “seriously concerned that Australia was to be made a tip for European refuse”.
The parochial media reverted to type. The Jewish refugees became the latest cartoonish enemy of social cohesion, replacing the Italian migrants of the 20s, who had replaced the Irish Australians of the conscription debates, who had replaced the Chinese Diggers, who had replaced the Irish orphan girls. When a Dutch-flagged ship carrying Jewish refugees was preparing to sail from Shanghai to Sydney, the capital-city tabloids informed their readers, without any evidence, that 3000 people were coming on three boats. The correct figure was 700 on one boat, and Calwell demanded a retraction from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Melbourne’s Sun NewsPictorial. But the media wasn’t finished yet. When the boat docked on March 16, 1947, The Courier-Mail declared: “700 Jews arrive, bring expensive furs and jewels”. The refugees carried “thousands of pounds’ worth of personal belongings, including jewels, furs, and expensive cameras”. The cameras were rated more newsworthy than the gas chambers they had escaped.
At these tipping points in a migration debate, leaders can turn a media scare into a deep-seated community prejudice. Australia was more than 90 per cent localborn, of essentially Anglo-Celtic stock, and the public was poised between re-engagement with the world and wariness of the damaged people who were coming from Europe. Opinion polls were in their infancy, so the question of whether Australia was prepared for Jewish migration was not put. But the answer would soon be in the affirmative as a Labor government and Liberal opposition argued for the door to be open.Calwell took on every critic, with backing from Menzies, who reaffirmed his party’s support for Jewish migration. Between them Calwell and Menzies encouraged community leaders — of whom the most prominent was Melbourne’s Catholic archbishop Daniel Mannix — to fly the flag for openness.
As the first migrant victims of discrimination in Australia, Catholics were a valuable ally for the Jewish refugees. In an editorial published in February 1947, The Catholic Weekly warned “there has been a dangerous growth of antiSemitism in Australia over the past year or so”. It was important to stamp it out now before it polarised the country. “We have not yet a Der Sturmer (a naz_ tabloid) in our midst, chanting a hymn of hate against every Jew and all Jewish influence, but we have thousands of otherwise rational Australians who are prepared to curse Hitler for everything except what he did to the Jews. Some are even prepared to give him credit for it.
”Calwell debated his opponents into submission. He hectored, he cajoled, and within six years of the bipartisan program success could be measured by the arrival of 50,000 migrants from Hitler’s killing fields of Poland.However, Calwell did make one unannounced concession to the bigots. Each migrant boat that came on his watch after that poorly received Dutch-flagged vessel would contain a mix of races. As he explained later: “We had to insist that half the accommodation in these wretched vessels must be sold to non-Jewish people. It would have created a great wave of anti-Semitism and would have been electorally disastrous for the Labor Party had we not made this decision.” His caution was misplaced, as the community proved more welcoming than even the most optimist politician of the day would have hoped.
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