Page 130 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ASIANS IN AUSTRALIA

The government’s unspoken justification for immigration and the result
of the policy will lead to the Asianisation of Australia. Our politicians
plan an Asian future for Australia. As the then Immigration Minister,
Senator Bolkus said, on 6/12/1994: ‘We cannot cut and should not cut
immigration because it would jeopardise our integration with Asia.’
Do we need to change the ethnic/racial make up of Australia for trade?
Trade comes and goes, but our identity as a nation should not be traded
for money, international approval or to fulfil a bizarre social experiment.
(Pauline Hanson’s One Nation 1998: 11)

What is interesting to note here is Hanson’s resistance to the discourse of economic
opportunism in favour of an idealistic, if reactionary, discourse of national identity.
Harking back to the notion of a separate, sovereign, ‘White Australia’ as the nation’s
common destiny, it was defined explicitly against the threat of a possible ‘Asian
invasion’. This inward-looking notion of Australian national identity is nothing
new; indeed, it was a hegemonic rendition of the national self, in the Gramscian
sense of being almost universally accepted as common sense and as naturally right
and good, until well into the 1960s. Its establishment was backed by an over-
whelming consensus which brought together white Australians of all classes; it
was a key aspect of what journalist Paul Kelly (1992) called ‘the Australian
Settlement’.
The move away from the idea of ‘White Australia’ during the 1960s was less
based on a broad national popular will. An important role was played by political
pressure from activist intellectual groups such as the Immigration Reform Group,
who called for a gradual relaxation of the racially discriminatory policies of the
government. In the end, the abolition of the White Australia policy was almost
exclusively a matter of strategic governmental decision-making, not underpinned
by national popular conviction but by ‘wide-ranging elite consensus’ (Viviani 1996:
8). In the new postcolonial world of East and South-East Asia the ‘White Australia’
ideal was increasingly seen as untenable, ‘especially at a time when Australia was
trying to find friends and allies there’ (Mackie 1997: 19).
The admission of many migrants from Asian countries after 1966 (when the
first, crucial immigration reforms were quietly introduced) represented a qualitative
turnaround of magnificent proportions, an historical shift which completely
overturned Australia’s crucial and long-standing self-definition as a ‘white nation’.
From one moment to the next, as it were, Australians were expected, without
much positive explanation, to ditch their entrenched self-conception as a sparsely
populated ‘white nation’ in a threateningly yellow and brown region, which
governments and political leaders of all persuasions had so passionately promoted
for decades. The matter came to a head with the Indochinese refugee crisis in the
second half of the 1970s. Australia simply had ‘no alternative’, observes Jamie
Mackie (1997: 27) in an overview article on the politics of Asian immigration,
but to take in its fair share of Indochinese refugees, as it needed to work closely
with the ASEAN countries and as the international world attempted to achieve

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