The Albanese government places party unity before most other considerations, so it is notable that there is more than one opinion in cabinet on what to do about immigration policy.
The decision of the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, to pull out of a National Press Club speech this month, having intended to announce a new policy, suggests that this is an unusually difficult issue for the government. One Nation, attracting three in 10 voters in some polling, makes no bones about blaming immigration levels for most of the country’s ills.
To be fair, immigration has almost always been a difficult issue for Labor in government. Labor was historically the low immigration party. From its earliest years, it saw migrant workers as a threat to wages and jobs, building on longstanding working-class attitudes towards unfair competition. Not even British workers passed muster, especially when they arrived under contract to local employers. Fear of labour competition trumped white solidarity or imperial brotherhood.
Labor did not invent the White Australia policy, but it was the most fervent supporter of it. The desire for security in the face of the threat of being “swamped” provided the context for the impulse to “populate or perish” for 70 years after federation in 1901. Labor never had the power to prevent such migration and, in any case, all the Labor party’s early leaders were migrants. In the end, the perceived need for a larger white population for the sake of national security challenged Labor’s traditional suspicion or hostility, although it took the arrival of full employment in 1942, along with the prospective “arrival” of a Japanese invader, to tip the balance decisively away from the party’s traditional stand.
But Labor had a problem. Labor leaders knew that their supporters opposed high levels of immigration. That would have created difficulty even if the migrants in view were British, but there were not enough of them interested in coming to provide the numbers needed. The claims of national security necessitated the extension of assistance to non-British Europeans, including refugees living in displaced person camps and southern Europeans often despised as “dagos”.
The country’s first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, pretended the migrants would be overwhelmingly British. Many were, and they received preference. But in the 1950s at least, most were not, and they opened the way for an increasingly diverse intake in the decades that followed.
There is a myth that these postwar migrants were welcomed with open arms; some commentators today like to contrast these “good, assimilable” migrants with the “bad unintegrated” migrants they see in the present. There was suspicion and even hostility to European migrants. Yet the process of their settlement was still a largely harmonious one, and it is worth asking ourselves why.
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The late historian John Hirst suggested that there was a strain in old Australia’s settler culture inclined to the polite overlooking of difference for the sake of social peace. That came into play after the war even as the migrant intake looked nothing like anything seen before, nor what the Labor government had promised “old Australians” when they had begun the process at the end of the war.
But Labor has always had a divided soul over immigration. Many of its traditional supporters have seen no reason to welcome migration where newcomers enter into direct competition with them for jobs or housing. After the second world war, the long economic boom, robust demand for unskilled labour and government policies that ensured a satisfactory supply of housing underpinned a successful immigration program. When those conditions gradually disappeared from the mid-1970s, so did whatever consensus that had emerged over immigration. Labor was initially at the forefront of the cuts to overseas arrival numbers, during the period of the Whitlam government.
The postwar consensus on immigration has never really been restored, any more than post-1973 governments were able to restore the postwar economic order. The closest we came was probably the middle of the Howard era, the early years of this century, when the government increased migrant numbers significantly during a period of economic buoyancy without provoking a public backlash. Its stringent, even cruel, approach to asylum seekers probably helped protect the larger program from the scrutiny and criticism it might have received in other circumstances.
It was a precarious balance and could probably only have been managed by a conservative government. Today, the perception that Labor is a party of high immigration and careless border administration, however untrue, aligns with the idea that it is a cosmopolitan party of tertiary-educated, metropolitan progressives out of touch with the hopes and fears of ordinary, patriotic working people.
The Albanese government has recognised the danger of reinforcing such an impression against the background of an insurgent One Nation eyeing off seats held by Labor in suburban and regional Australia. Also to Labor’s right is a Coalition desperately seeking to meet the One Nation challenge by aping its anti-immigration rhetoric and policies.
There are surely in this moment some parallels with Labor’s change of direction on immigration in the mid-1940s. But the environment today is one of rivals scrambling to make hay from the immigration issue rather than, as in the 1940s, an emerging major party consensus in favour of larger numbers and more diversity. Which path it takes in response will likely define the identity of the Labor party – the character of its soul – for many years to come.
