Discussion 6: “From all the lands on earth we come … ”?

In the third session of the 2025 discussion series “Understanding Victoria” we consider the shifts in Australian immigration policy and the way this reshaped Victoria’s population, its economy, society and culture in the period bracketed by the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War. In particular, the slow dismantling of the White Australia policy, the interplay of economic growth and a policy emphasis on assimilation and the wave of refugees following the Vietnam War, all contributed to major change over the long postwar economic boom.

The first discussion in this series in 2025 examined the distinctive features of what Frank Castles termed the “wage earners’ welfare state”. The development of trade union campaigns in the late nineteenth century for the eight-hour working day and for protection from employment practices that undercut wages led to a socio-legal and economic landscape that shaped institutions and social policy on and following Federation. Key among these was the setting of minimum wages and conditions and the development of conciliation and arbitration as a means of resolving industrial disputes at State and at Commonwealth level.

The second discussion examined the factors that shaped the distinguishing features of social welfare policy in Australia as it developed in the twentieth century from the 1930s to the 1960s. Much of current welfare policy was crafted and based in decisions made in the middle period of the twentieth century, which saw Australia largely reject the ‘social insurance’ models of the UK and Europe. In its stead welfare policy that provided ‘means tested’ support from general government revenue became the norm.

Apart from veterans of armed forces and their families whose income support payments operated in a parallel system from the end of World War I, welfare policy focused on payments geared to those who were unable by virtue of age or disability to find adequate income by virtue of employment. During World War II, following the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Commonwealth took over responsibility for social security and enacted a series of legislative measures that set in place welfare schemes that created Australia’s modern welfare state.

This next discussion focuses on the third major arm of government policy that shaped our economy and society in the twentieth century - immigration policy. From Federation and the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 that underpinned the White Australia policy, it was the decisions about which people from which lands could come that shaped the State of Victoria and the nation that we have become.

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Background information

Immigration and ‘White Australia’

In 1942 in his book, The Myth of Open Spaces, the Melbourne economist, Bill Forsyth argued for the expansion of migration beyond its previous focus on those from the British Isles and Ireland.

Two million migrants arrived in Australia between 1945 and 1965. And in this period the nature of migration policy and the resulting populations changed the shape of Australia and ushered in new economic and societal directions.

In the 19th century, assisted migration sponsored by colonial governments brought large numbers of immigrants, many of them single women, largely from the United Kingdom, to supplement the free migrants and the unfree, the convicts, also from the United Kingdom that worked and settled these lands.

The gold rushes that occurred, as Victoria became a separate colony, added others drawn by the opportunity of gold, including a significant number of people from China, who formed the third largest group of immigrants by 1901.

On the federation of the colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia, one of the first pieces of legislation, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, brought into being what became known as the ‘White Australia’ policy, which was framed to limit migration particularly by Chinese, South Sea Islanders and other non-European people.

This migration legislation was accompanied by the Naturalisation Act of 1903 which prevented people of Asian, African or Pacific Islander descent from becoming citizens. This Act also excluded Aboriginal people. At this point all ‘Australians’ were British subjects, as were the British migrants who entered Australia.

Within this policy framework, it is estimated that in the 1920s some 340,000 people migrated to Australia, of whom two-thirds were assisted migrants from Britain. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the advent of World War II turned attention away from encouraging immigration to Australia.

The expansion of immigration

After World War II the Australian government embarked on an ambitious immigration program sparked in part by concern about defence of our island nation. Its initial emphasis was assisted British immigration, with Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration, opining in 1946 “It is my hope that for every foreign migrant there will be ten people from the United Kingdom.”

However immediately following WWII Australia also accepted migrants from Europe’s displaced persons camps. DPs as they were known, initially from the Baltic States, joined “Ten Pound Poms” in the wave of migrants that arrived in Australia in the late 1940s.

Demand for ‘new’ Australians was such that migrants from southern Europe, principally from Italy and Greece were accepted and by the 1950s small numbers of temporary migrants from the Middle East and Asia. Immigration contributed more than a third of an average annual population growth of around 2.7 per cent through to the 1960s.

Although during this period migrants from the United Kingdom remained the largest single group, the expansion of immigration beyond British subjects to other European nations and to small numbers from Asia and the Middle East reflected a shift away from the very restrictive immigration policies of the early twentieth century.

In 1958 references to race were removed from the Migration Act, yet it took until the 1970s, following the Vietnam War and the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, for significant numbers of migrants from Asia to arrive in Australia. The end of the Vietnam War brought refugees largely from South Vietnam, as well as war orphans, and wives of Australian servicemen who had been in Vietnam.

Australian citizenship

The other significant change after WWII was the Chifley government’s Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, which created Australian citizenship, even though Australian citizens also remained British subjects. Australian-born individuals automatically became citizens. Rights were limited for Aboriginal people until the last State (Queensland) changed its laws in 1965 extending voting rights.

This Act also provided a path for non-British subjects to be naturalized and become Australian citizens, although it was a more difficult path for non-British subjects.

It was not until 1973 under the Whitlam government that preferential treatment for British subjects was removed, restrictions on migrants of non-European descent were removed and the name changed to the Australian Citizenship Act. It was a further decade until British subject status was abolished in Australian legislation.

Conclusion

The colonies that formed Australia built their populations through migration. With Federation a focus on migrants from Britain and a preference for British subjects shaped migration policy and supported a cultural inclination to assimilation as a way of creating the new nation.

The drive to increased migration post-WWII led to the circumstances that gradually undermined the immigration restrictions that had underpinned the White Australia policy. It was not until the 1970s that significant migration of people from Asia occurred and assimilation was replaced by multiculturalism.

In the three decades post WWII, Australia created a nation where population growth came to be dominated by migration, and a nation where a diversity of cultural and linguistic groups became characteristic. Did the changes in immigration policy after WWII signal a new direction in Australian policy?

Recommended reading

Markus, Andrew (1994). The Era of assimilation, 1945-65. From A. Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788-1993, Allen & Unwin, 155-243.