As the title says what if Australia had maintained it's immigration policies from the 50's and 60's? Note I mean just the immigration policy not the treatment of the Aboriginies ect. How would the world relate to Australia today? On the one hand it's a blatantly racist policy but on the other a country has a perfect right to say who can and cannot emmigrate to it.
Australia keeps the "White Australia" Immigration policy.
- Thread starter Peg Leg Pom
- Start date
Australia would presumably be smaller in population and therefore have a smaller economy, smaller military, and smaller global footprint. I'm looking here and it seems like in 2022 roughly 15% of Australia was non-white (I included Iraqis but the number should be a little bit higher since some of the emigrants from white majority countries like the US would have been non-white but the statistics don't count by race). Australia would therefore be at least 15% smaller in population, but probably more since the stats include 2nd and 3rd generation non-white and mixed race immigrants born in Australia. Let's pull a number out of our asses and say 18%. What would an Australia almost 1/5 smaller in population than in the real 2022 be like on the world stage? For reference , the smaller Australia would have around 15 million people, putting it between the Netherlands and Belgium in size as far as high income countries go.
Australian meanings of "white" aren't identical to other settler colonial states; and, have changed; and, aren't necessarily those put by the Bureau of Statistics.
Lacking "Populate or Perish" would have increased wage rates considerably, and resulted in critical path development choices, which would have changed the political complexion of the state and international political economy with reference to open cut resource extraction.
yours,
Sam R.
Lacking "Populate or Perish" would have increased wage rates considerably, and resulted in critical path development choices, which would have changed the political complexion of the state and international political economy with reference to open cut resource extraction.
yours,
Sam R.
If Australia is concerned about its population not growing fast enough, or growing enough full stop it can quite easily seek out a couple of immigration incentives.
One that pops to mind is in the wake of the British miners strike it could quite easily give incentives to British miners to emigrate to bolster its own growing mining industry. This could also apply more broadly to a deindustrialising Britain. In addition to targeting this demographic by further extension it could target the administrative workers/middle class too.
It won't make up the total shortfall, but easing, subsidising and inventivising British (and Irish, American, Canadian and New Zealand) to emigrate as well as incentives for having larger families (not unheard of in Australia) can go some way to mitigating population stagnation.
One that pops to mind is in the wake of the British miners strike it could quite easily give incentives to British miners to emigrate to bolster its own growing mining industry. This could also apply more broadly to a deindustrialising Britain. In addition to targeting this demographic by further extension it could target the administrative workers/middle class too.
It won't make up the total shortfall, but easing, subsidising and inventivising British (and Irish, American, Canadian and New Zealand) to emigrate as well as incentives for having larger families (not unheard of in Australia) can go some way to mitigating population stagnation.
At some point Australia would need more immigrants. And another group could be Russians after fall of Soviet Union and perhaps try get some white immigrants from post-Apartheid Zimbabwe and South Africa.
But not sure if even these are enough. Perhaps Australia could extend definition of white to Japanese and Korean people like IIRC Apartheid SA did.
On that note, what would the international reputation (or lack thereof) of Australia be ITTL, as they're practically an ethno-state ITTL.
Leftitists probably would have pretty bad view on such nation which accepts only some certain ethnic groups/races insteasd accepting everybody.
£5 poms were already saturated as a migration route.
The scandal of an Australian soldier with an indonesian wife in the 1950s was massive.
The existing "better worker" breeding and labour quality programmes saturated: Australians refused to reproduce on largely economic grounds based on rational long term predictions of the amount of quality labour expected to be available.
Australians didn't historically "forgive" Japan until the 1990s.
By the 1980s it is "too late" economically.
Europeans were "non-white" in the 1940s and the Labor government's refugee programmes for right wingers and social democrat workers was controversial historically: Europeans weren't "white." The Liberal government's populate or perish migration programme for Europeans was racially controversial.
There isn't an alternate population source within Australian racism in a timely manner.
"White"ness in Australia at the moment works by the eventual incorporation of every migrant ethnicity into the "white" complex with an internally structured view of "whiteness" as complex as the Brazilian conceptions of race. Every migrant ethnicity. People who were here first are eternally denied access to whiteness, unless they "pass" continuously. Accent / dialect is a much larger marker than skin. The first instance of this process would be the end of the pro-/anti-Irish identity street battles in children in the 1960s, as "New Migrants" or "wogs" became the new not-quite-white. Traditional Chinese communities were integrated into whiteness much later, around the early 2000s. In the early 2000s one could imagine that if a community stuck around three generations, and their children took up Australian standard suburban accents or a variant or dialectical equivalent, that as newer migrants arrived that community would in future be viewed as "white-in-comparison." By the early 2000s, "wogs," and "Viets" were comparatively inside; and, culture woke up to the existence of Traditional Chinese australian communities by reference to post-1989 Chinese migration or non-migration groups. By the early 2000s anyone with half a brain could see that "lebs" or the Lebanese migrant communities were about to become thoroughly integrated into the racial power structure.
This structure of Whiteness solidified in the 1960s, by reflecting on the position of the Irish under populate-or-perish migration. Without populate-or-perish, Australian white-ness would be much more exclusionist, and much of the bigotry towards those from overseas would have had no economic or social reason to have been contested in the 1970s-1990s. Don't compare such an Australia to South Africa: South Africa was internationally policed for its apartheid society. Australia has consistently gotten away with it in the court of international opinion. Without a non-Isles-of-the-Britains migration programme, real existing racism in Australia would be deeply ethno-cultural, wouldn't be internationally policed, and the settler-society racism attacking surviving (and by the 1960s) beginning to rebound or thrive underground indigenous cultures would be a self-supporting self-righteous and internationally uninspected mono-cultural hell. As opposed to historically where it is poly-cultural at least where cafes come to pass. Incidentally modern Australian coffee culture is destroyed without the Italian pressure coffee culture brought by Italians and amplified by traditional Greek fishshops under expanded Greek and Balkan migration. Populate-or-drink-tea.
yours,
Sam R.
1 Ted Mackey and the Mt Isa strike is more a matter of an American trained unique union individual. And even there it was Finnish social democrats who viewed the existing union as a boss's union.
2 Historically the "wogs*3" brought their own Communist Parties with them, and the PCI (Australian Branches) and KKE (Australian branches) were *larger* CPs than the CPA.
3 At the time a term of abuse, now a term of pride in ethnicities which are simultaneously Australian ethnicities and Australian [x] ethnicities. This is common in historical racism, where the "banter" culture of Australia turns insults into matters of pride (over time). Amusingly the terms of abuse for Isles-of-Britain-with-multiple-generations-in-Australia Australians is the impotent "skip" or other impotent abuses. I'd like to think that the very structure of banter here cuts the balls off the majority benefits of "whiteness," leaving them with no real identity at all.
The scandal of an Australian soldier with an indonesian wife in the 1950s was massive.
The existing "better worker" breeding and labour quality programmes saturated: Australians refused to reproduce on largely economic grounds based on rational long term predictions of the amount of quality labour expected to be available.
Australians didn't historically "forgive" Japan until the 1990s.
By the 1980s it is "too late" economically.
Apart from Aboriginal rights which had to be internationally ordered in the 1930s by Moscow the Australian left didn't discover racism historically*1*2 until the 1970s.
Europeans were "non-white" in the 1940s and the Labor government's refugee programmes for right wingers and social democrat workers was controversial historically: Europeans weren't "white." The Liberal government's populate or perish migration programme for Europeans was racially controversial.
There isn't an alternate population source within Australian racism in a timely manner.
"White"ness in Australia at the moment works by the eventual incorporation of every migrant ethnicity into the "white" complex with an internally structured view of "whiteness" as complex as the Brazilian conceptions of race. Every migrant ethnicity. People who were here first are eternally denied access to whiteness, unless they "pass" continuously. Accent / dialect is a much larger marker than skin. The first instance of this process would be the end of the pro-/anti-Irish identity street battles in children in the 1960s, as "New Migrants" or "wogs" became the new not-quite-white. Traditional Chinese communities were integrated into whiteness much later, around the early 2000s. In the early 2000s one could imagine that if a community stuck around three generations, and their children took up Australian standard suburban accents or a variant or dialectical equivalent, that as newer migrants arrived that community would in future be viewed as "white-in-comparison." By the early 2000s, "wogs," and "Viets" were comparatively inside; and, culture woke up to the existence of Traditional Chinese australian communities by reference to post-1989 Chinese migration or non-migration groups. By the early 2000s anyone with half a brain could see that "lebs" or the Lebanese migrant communities were about to become thoroughly integrated into the racial power structure.
This structure of Whiteness solidified in the 1960s, by reflecting on the position of the Irish under populate-or-perish migration. Without populate-or-perish, Australian white-ness would be much more exclusionist, and much of the bigotry towards those from overseas would have had no economic or social reason to have been contested in the 1970s-1990s. Don't compare such an Australia to South Africa: South Africa was internationally policed for its apartheid society. Australia has consistently gotten away with it in the court of international opinion. Without a non-Isles-of-the-Britains migration programme, real existing racism in Australia would be deeply ethno-cultural, wouldn't be internationally policed, and the settler-society racism attacking surviving (and by the 1960s) beginning to rebound or thrive underground indigenous cultures would be a self-supporting self-righteous and internationally uninspected mono-cultural hell. As opposed to historically where it is poly-cultural at least where cafes come to pass. Incidentally modern Australian coffee culture is destroyed without the Italian pressure coffee culture brought by Italians and amplified by traditional Greek fishshops under expanded Greek and Balkan migration. Populate-or-drink-tea.
yours,
Sam R.
1 Ted Mackey and the Mt Isa strike is more a matter of an American trained unique union individual. And even there it was Finnish social democrats who viewed the existing union as a boss's union.
2 Historically the "wogs*3" brought their own Communist Parties with them, and the PCI (Australian Branches) and KKE (Australian branches) were *larger* CPs than the CPA.
3 At the time a term of abuse, now a term of pride in ethnicities which are simultaneously Australian ethnicities and Australian [x] ethnicities. This is common in historical racism, where the "banter" culture of Australia turns insults into matters of pride (over time). Amusingly the terms of abuse for Isles-of-Britain-with-multiple-generations-in-Australia Australians is the impotent "skip" or other impotent abuses. I'd like to think that the very structure of banter here cuts the balls off the majority benefits of "whiteness," leaving them with no real identity at all.
Last edited:
iddt3
Donor
I feel like there is a real thread of insight here, buried under jargon, choppy sentence structure and some random shots about international opinion?