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Mass migration in Australia

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MASS MIGRATION IN AUSTRALIA

(essay)

In my view, the basic ethical outlook of Marxist and Catholic philosophy
about the relationship between the human race and the material
environment are quite similar despite the apparent conflict between
them. Over the course of my own life both have contributed to the
formation of my attitude to the migration question.

Both ethical systems regard the human species as the highest development
of evolution and start with the notion that the interests of human
beings are the primary point of departure in judging most ethical
questions. Marxists would have it that human consciousness is the
highest product, so far, of material development, and Thomists and
Catholics would have it that the human soul and humanity are the peak of
God’s creation.

While both ethical systems would not neglect at all the importance of
the rest of the material world, the animal world, etc, they would regard
the interests of the human species, viewed as a totality, as the primary
point of departure in developing an ethical framework for migration
policy.

In this, they would both be different, for instance, to the ethics of
Peter Singer, who would rate the interests of the animal world as being
on the same plane as the interests of humanity. The ethical standpoint
of deep ecologists, and people like Tim Flannery, Ted Trainer and Mark
O’Connor would, I believe in practice, give greater weight to the
interests of the natural world than to those of the humans that use it.

These two moral standpoints, the Marxist one, expressed in the slogans
of socialist internationalism: “the unity of labour is the hope of the
world”, and “workers of the world unite”, and the similar Catholic moral
view that all humans are brothers and sisters under God, have been major
defining ideological influences, sometimes in conflict, but surprisingly
often reinforcing each other, in the evolution of the labour movement in
Australia.

The eventual, relatively recent, emergence in the labour movement of the
idea of the unity of the human race as the dominant ideology, is really
a kind of flowering of the ethical views of both the above streams. This
flowering of humanism is one of the main reasons why the labour
movement’s attitude to migration has so dramatically changed in the 20th
century from entrenched British Australia racism to support for
non-discriminatory migration and multiculturalism.

In Australian cultural terms I am a Marxist atheist of mainly Irish
Catholic cultural background. All the original ancestors of the human
population of Australia, including the indigenous population, are
migrants. The migration history of Australia has been one in which, from
the beginning, indigenous Australians, the Irish Catholics and the
secular working class of British origin, initially convicts, were in
constant conflict with the British ruling class of the new colony.

I’m mainly descended from the Irish, and I identify totally with the
conflict against the British ruling class in 19th century Australia, in
which my ancestors participated.

From my standpoint, every additional wave of migration has helped to
undermine the cultural and political hegemony of the British ruling
class, and this is unambiguously a good thing. I celebrate a healthy,
plebian, popular Australian nationalism, which is necessarily, and has
been historically, in conflict with the reactionary British-Astralian
nationalism of the Australian ruling class.

The desperate nostalgia of someone like Miriam Dixson about the passing
of what she calls the “Anglo-Celtic core culture” produces in me a
certain bitter amusement. I celebrate the passing of that culture. It
wasn’t my culture at all.

The new, diverse and cosmopolitan Australia, in which we all have a
stake: indigenous Australians, Irish Catholics, the secular working
class and middle class of British origin, and each wave of non-British
migration, including the recent and spectacular Asian wave, has
produced, and is constantly reproducing, a robust modern Australian
culture of great diversity and strength, which I enjoy and celebrate.

Many of the most stimulating features of this modern culture are the
product of, in particular, the post-war waves of mass migration. My
Irish Catholic forebears, and the secular working class, took the
process of humanising brutal British Imperial Australia a fair distance
in the conflicts of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and the
recent waves of migration have further civilised Australia.

Even the unquestionably important contribution of the civilised and
humane strand within the British cultural tradition, as exemplified by a
scholar such as Manning Clark or a writer like Patrick White, can only
really come to full fruition within the framework of a healthy
multicultural Australian polity, cleansed of the bigoted ethnocentrism
of the old British ruling class Australia.

Anyone who has lived, as I have, from 1937 to now, has only to reflect
on and remember the claustrophobic cultural atmosphere of
British-Australia in the 1950s to understand what I mean in this
context. It is hard for any young person now to even imagine the tension
created in a cinema in 1960 if you didn’t stand up for God Save the
Queen.

The most conservative forces in society, which hark back nostalgically
to the useful cement provided for the preservation of class privilege by
all the ridiculous and unpleasant cultural impedimenta of
British-Australia, are at the centre of the sporadic attacks on
multiculturalism. Their political motivation in these attacks is quite
clear.

Cultural diversity and multiculturalism, incorporated as they are into a
new modern, plebian Australian national identity, are a far more
civilised human environment for us all to live in.

Those who disagree with me on this can try to reverse these
developments, but I don’t rate their prospects of success very highly.
We have already gone a very long way in this very healthy direction.

I don’t intend to spend too much time celebrating the immense advantages
produced by all our past mass migrations. They are obvious, and they are
most strikingly noticeable in the global city of Australasia, Sydney,
where we are holding this conference.

Despite the Sodom and Gomorrah weepings and gnashings of teeth about
Sydney that you get from the likes of Miriam Dixson, Robert Birrell and
Katharine Betts, the extraordinary and workable cultural diversity of
Sydney is the small model of what life will be like throughout
Australasia within the next 20 or 30 years.

The constant Jeremiad of the Monash anti-migrationists over the last 25
years about ethnic ghettoes, particularly in Sydney, is emerging ever
more clearly as time goes on, as merely anti-migration propaganda. These
so-called ethnic ghettoes are, in fact, constantly changing and
evolving.

In practice, in Australia, and particularly in Sydney, there are very
few “unmeltable ethnics”, to use Michael Novak’s term from the United
States of 30 years ago. While multiculturalists battles to preserve the
useful aspects of discrete ethnic identities, nevertheless the evolving
Australian national identity, which is quite real, remains the major
cultural force into which the other ethnic identities tend to feed and
blend, while the discrete contribution of the individual ethnic
identities is often renewed by continued migration.

This whole process is accelerated by an increasing amount of exogamy
(intermarriage between ethnic groups). The latest wave of mass
migration, the Asian wave, has produced an enormous amount of this kind
of intermarriage.

The striking feature of modern Australian society is the way the
repeated predictions, over many years, of communal strife, by the likes
of Birrell, Geoffrey Blainey and Pauline Hanson, are completely
contradicted by the reality of Australian life. The further you get into
the diversity in the heart of Sydney, for instance, the smaller the
amount of noticeable ethnic conflict, which is far less overt now than
it was in the 1940s or the 1950s.

We are well over the hump, so to speak, in these matters. Large-scale
violent ethnic conflicts are very unlikely in Australia in the future.
Most of us are now too civilised and we – in this context a comfortable
majority of the population – will beat all xenophobia and racism, even
when it is disguised as nostalgia for the “Anglo-Celtic core culture”
back into its cave whenever it shows its ugly head.

The benefits of past migrations, from the point of view of the migrants
themselves and of the other citizens of the developing Australian
society

Up to the gold rushes of the 1850s, Australia was mainly a series of
brutal penal colonies of British imperialism. But, paradoxically, many
convicts stayed voluntarily in the colony after their release because in
many ways, even then, it was a better place to live than Britain,
Scotland or Ireland.The origins of the convicts were relatively diverse.
Although most of them were drawn from the English urban underclass
around London, about 20 per cent of them were Irish and almost 50 per
cent of the smaller number of women convicts were Irish Catholics.

Over the whole period of convictism, about 1 per cent were black
convicts from West Africa and the West Indies, and there were also about
1000 Jewish convicts. The gold rushes brought an accelleration of mass
migration, from Great Britain and Ireland, China and Germany, and later
in the century, a large forced labour component, the “Kanakas” from the
“South Sea Islands” (mainly the Solomons and New Hebrides, now Vanuatu).

The gold rushes and the shortage of labour that caused the mass
migration, both assisted and voluntary, resulted in a high price for
labour in the Australian colonies, making settlement in Australia very
attractive for workers. British working class migrants and Irish
migrants contributed to the development of the country and were
beneficiaries of the high price of labour in the Australian colonies, as
were the Chinese, the Germans and others.

From the point of view of most of the participants in these migrations,
Australia was a much better place economically than where they came
from. Much historical research has been done on letters back home from
Irish migrants in Australia. They were gathered mainly by the historian
Patrick O’Farrell.

The overwhelming majority of these letters speak of the better standard
of living in the new country than in famine-ridden, Britain-pillaged
Ireland. The Irish were particularly motivated by the possibility of
taking up land in Australia.

Even the “South Sea Islanders”, who had been “blackbirded” to Australia,
and the Chinese, who had been at the bottom end of the Australian social
ladder, were very reluctant to leave after the imposition of the White
Australia Policy in 1900. There were more economic opportunities in
Australia than in China or the Pacific Islands.

The migration to Australia was always much more heterogenous than
British Australian mythology allows, and in the early 20th century
particularly there were constant chain migrations from Russia, the
southern Slav lands, Italy, Greece and Malta, despite occasional brutal
outbursts of racism against these migrations. One of the worst examples
of such racism was the forcible deportation of 6000 Germans and southern
Slavs after the First World War.

A large number of Jewish people migrated to Australia just before the
Second World War, escaping fascism in Europe. They were very glad to get
here and many prospered in Australia.

Some parts of northern Australia, such as the Cairns area, the
Townsville area, and particularly the Northern Territory, always had a
much more diverse ethnic and cultural mix than many other parts of
Australia, even despite the White Australia Policy.

For much of its history, for instance, the Northern Territory had a
larger proportion of people of Asian origin, Aboriginal origin and mixed
race origin than whites. A recent very useful article in Labor History
by Maria Martinez underlines the complex interplay between the racial
composition of the population in the Northern Territory and attitudes in
the labour movement that helped to undermine the White Australia Policy,
even on a national scale.

After the Second World War another wave of mass migration commenced,
including people from the Baltic states, Eastern Europeans, Greeks,
Italians and Dutch. They were very glad to get here, away from
war-devastated Europe, and they participated in building the Snowy
Mountains Scheme and developing modern Australia. In the 1960s and 1970s
more people came from Arab countries and Turkey, and they, too,
contributed to the development of Australia and did well here compared
with the then relative poverty of the places they came from.

There are now 300,000 people in Australia of Indochinese origin, who are
here because of Australia’s involvement in support of the United States
intervention in the civil war in Vietnam. Although most of the
Indochinese came here as refugees, they show no signs of wanting to
leave and they have contributed to the development of modern Australia.
Historically, Australia has been a haven for refugees from many
countries, including now, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovars and East Timorese.
They too have contributed to the development of modern Australia.

The latest wave of migration has been very varied, mainly from Asia, and
this has pushed the number of people with some Asian background up to
1.4 million in the past 15 years. This migration has included both
hard-working poorer people, highly trained young people and energetic
business migrants bringing modest packages of capital with them.

This Asian migration is particularly obvious as a major factor in
economic development, has served as a buffer against economic
depression, and has particularly contributed to development in Sydney,
Brisbane and Perth, and to reducing unemployment in those cities.

The striking thing about these migrations is that, particularly since
the Second World War, when our rate of migration has been by far the
highest in the world (except for Israel), it has in fact been achieved
at the same time as a substantial and obvious reduction in racial and
cultural tensions, compared, say, with the 1950s. This is in fact the
opposite of the exaggerated conflict that the chauvinist opponents of
migration constantly predict even now, despite all the evidence in front
of their eyes.

In Australian conditions, the more diverse the migration, and the larger
it is, the more it undermines stupid xenophobic practices and attitudes.

Anyone with an eye to see, walking around this laid-back, tough, intense
Sydney of ours, can’t avoid being struck by the way the cultural
diversity that is now dominant in our city works so effectively. It has
been very moving to me in the last couple of weeks attending
demonstrations, which rapidly grew in cynical old Sydney, to 30,000
people, in support of the people of East Timor, to observe the wonderful
cultural diversity of the Australians in those demonstrations.

I grew up in the 1940s and the 1950s and you’d better believe it, mass
migration has been overwhelmingly beneficial to every aspect of the real
quality of human life in Australia, as I experience it. Food, culture,
politics, the economy, the whole universe of things that affect the
essential features of our life.

“New class” theory

Opponents of migration and other reactionaries have recently dusted off
the quite old theory of the new class to stigmatise supporters of
migration and multiculturalism as members of an egregious elite,
different to the popular Australian “volk” who, it is claimed, are
ativistic and racist to the core.

This desperate rhetoric is inaccurate as a sociological description of
modern Australian society, and rather ineffective as a call to arms.
When examined closely, it is obviously a biased, primarily ideological
construct.

Nearly 20 per cent of the adult population, including school teachers
and nurses, now have degrees, and half of them are women. Do they all
constitute members of a “new class”? The idea is absurd. When pressed,
ideologues such as Betts, Dixson and Bill Hayden redefine their
proposition a bit to say that maybe the “new class” consists only of
people in the media and the bureaucracy who favour migration (and
disagree with them), which makes this construction even more absurd
sociologically speaking. It is merely a sort of bizarre point-scoring
aimed at stirring up perceived popular animosity to people with degrees.

The problem with it as a call to arms is that a majority of the
industrial working class without university degrees, at whom it is
presumably directed, are recent non-English-speaking-background (NESB)
migrants themselves, and are therefore very unlikely to respond to this
demagogy. This recent desperate new class rhetoric underlines the
developing social isolation of the people who use it in the newly
evolving Australia that is already around us.

Opinion polls and notions of public opinion

Betts and other conservative populists make big fuss about some very old
public opinion polls, which they claim show that migration is unpopular.
Occasionally Betts acknowledges that opinion polls results are
influenced powerfully by how the questions are asked, and what
information is given to the people polled about the issues before they
are polled, but she shrugs off this problem and makes much of her
proposition that the elites are ignoring public opinion in their support
of migration.

In the absence of carefully controlled polling, not overloaded by
emotive construction, Betts’s conclusions from her polls have to be
treated with great reserve for the same reasons that opponents of the
death penalty tend to put aside emotive tabloid polls, which often seem
to favour capital punishment.

We now know a great deal about the phenomenon of push polling, and many
of Betts’s favoured polls get close this. The deliberately emotive way
many public opinion poll questions are posed is the reason that most
democrats are very suspicious of the right-wing populist mania for
citizen-initiated referendums.

An interesting new development, probably caused by rapid demographic
changes in Australia’s major cities, is that recent opinion polls,
organised though they are in this fairly emotive way, are beginning to
show a fairly substantial swing in favour of migration (article by
Murray Goot in The Bulletin of February 15, 2000). What spin Betts and
company will put on these changing poll results?

In reality, political outcomes in bourgeois democracies such as
Australia are decided by a complex interaction between various aspects
of the popular will, and the special interests of the ruling class,
expressed through their manipulation of the media. What comes through in
the media is much more an expression of the interests of the tiny elite
that owns the media than any independent expression of opinion by a
so-called new class of media workers.

In elections the voting is decided by a multitude of factors, and
“public opinion” is actually a product of the push and pull of assorted
interests and pressure groups. It is even possible that, influenced by
right-wing populist hysteria against migration, expressed through the
tabloid media, a majority of electors may wish for a reduction in
migration. When they come to voting, however, many other factors
influence their decision as well.

Many people who favour low migration end up voting for parties that will
support high migration and, indeed, the reverse also applies because of
the many factors that affect voting behaviour. That’s all part of the
political process.For example, a clear majority of the population
opposes a GST. Nevertheless, the Tories and the ruling class have
managed to push through a GST because they succeeded in scraping
together a slight majority in an election.

I believe that highish, humane imigration, non-discrimination in
immigration, and reasonable family reunion, are overwhelmingly morally
justified.

I believe that one takes advantage of one’s democratic rights to
influence the political process in whatever reasonable way is available
to get the outcome you want. Everybody else involved in politics does
the same thing, and why should those who favour high migration suddenly
impose on themselves a self-denying ordinance in these matters when the
reactionary tabloid press puts so much effort into whipping up prejudice
against perceived minorities, and migration in general.

An underlying British-Australia cultural egotism surfaces repeatedly in
Katharine Betts’s book, The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in
Australia (Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1999). Her ingenious use of the
notion of “markers” in relation to the so called “new class” is very
revealing. In her view, implacable hostility to racism, and any sympathy
with multiculturalism are evidence either of membership of the “new
class”, or “special interests”, by reason of NESB background.

She also indicts her so-called new class for an “anti-national”
animosity towards wars and militarism, and associates this
anti-militarism with “new class” attitudes on racism and migration. I
find this construction extremely curious, as I’m told Ms Betts is
herself a Quaker.

I wonder what Ms Betts makes of the almost total transformation of the
bulk of the “new class” including myself, into advocates of immediate
military action to protect the people of East Timor against the vicious
Indonesian army.

I reject celebration of the imperialist bloodbath of the First World
War. I spent the most useful part of my life campaigning against the
Vietnam War and I take none of that back. Nevertheless, I strongly
favour the recent Australian military intervention in East Timor, much
to the chagrin of the right-wing populist P.P. McGuinness. (McGuinness
and I always seem to be on opposite sides, and this pleases me. On the
odd occasion when I’ve agreed with McGuinness, I very carefully examine
my reasoning to see where I’ve gone wrong.)

Curiously, Sydney postmodern theorist Ghassan Hage, who expresses an
ostensibly leftist opposition to existing multiculturalism in his exotic
book White Nation, actually shares Betts’s methodology, in that he
develops his own version of the inaccurate “new class” theory.

What an implacably British-Australia chauvinist construction Katharine
Betts’s use of new class rhetoric really is. It has no appeal at all for
me, given my largely Irish Catholic background, and it’s not likely to
appeal to any social group other than a rapidly declining Anglo
upper-class. The industrial working class is largely of NESB background.
The nudging 20 per cent of the population who now have degrees, and the
700,000 students are, by definition, infected by this “rampant
cosmopolitanism”. The audience for Betts’s now slightly eccentric “new
class” theory is really quite small, and declining all the time.

The economic effects of migration

The most coherent, energetic and persistent anti-migrationists are the
group around Robert Birrell and Katharine Betts at Monash University,
who tend to make the ideological running for most other opponents of
migration.

The really rabid xenophobes, such as Pauline Hanson, feed off their
arguments. The Monash group has two quite contradictory lines in
relation to the economic effects of migration.

One line of argument, which they share with people such as Ted Trainer,
is a general, currently rather popular, polemic against the whole idea
of economic growth. They argue that economic growth, which migration
fuels, is bad for us.

Well, there’s a tiny element of truth in this line of argument. Some
economic growth is bad and should be fought on a case by case basis. For
instance, woodchipping of old growth forests is quite antipathetic to
the interests of the human race and the environment. Much economic
growth, however, while it should be made more civilised and reorganised
in a rational way, is desirable from the point of view of most humans on
the planet, who don’t yet have sufficient access to all kinds of
material goods to make their life better.

The arguments of deep ecologists such as Ted Trainer against all
economic growth are, in practice, hostile to the aspirations of most
human beings for substantial improvements to their conditions of life.
The use of this kind of argument by comfortable, affluent anti-migration
academics in a rich, first-world country such as Australia is thoroughly
repellant, and I’m fascinated that the Monash group has used that kind
of argument in the six or seven books that I’ve collected of their
published work, as far back as 1977.

The other main line of argument is more or less the opposite of the
first one. It is that migration is bad for the economy because it
diverts resources from unstated better uses to the construction of
infrastructure for the migrants, and that much of this labour is used in
a manufacturing economy that is being scaled down anyway because of
globalisation and the destruction of tariff barriers (which the Monash
group explicitly applauds).

They even argue that a bad feature of migration is that some resources
are diverted to infrastructure for the new migrants, reducing the
average productivity of labour. Nevertheless, interests such as the
housing industry and manufacturing capitalists that want to sell their
goods, are attacked for having a vested interest in migration.

Viewed in any sensible or even-handed way, these economic attacks on
migration tend to undermine and contradict each other, but for these
people anything goes in the war against migration. As one line of
economic their argument after another is demolished by changing
circumstances (almost none of their economic predictions in relation to
migration have eventuated) the Birrell group works very hard to come up
with a new economic angle against migration.

There is now a fairly considerable body of concrete analysis and
description of the economic effects of migration, the most recent
example of which is the work of Bruce Chapman in Canberra. The general
conclusion of almost all economists, conservative or left-wing, with a
few exceptions, is that migration is either more or less neutral in
relation to economic effects or, in most circumstances, a positive
stimulus to economic development and a positive factor in reducing
unemployment.

Empirically, this would certainly seem to be the case. Cities in
Australia such as Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, which are hot-spots for
migration, are also at the lower end of the unemployment statistics.
Cities such as Melbourne, Newcastle, Adelaide and Hobart, which are
stagnant as far as recent migration is concerned, are at the higher end
of the unemployment statistics.

There is another subtle economic point about substantial, diverse
migration. One of the factors that helped Australia get the Olympic
Games was the presence in Australia of substantial migrant communities
from almost everywhere on earth, and the Games will give Australia a
considerable economic boost, both before and after, for obvious reasons.

A similar point applies to trade, particularly with Asia. The presence
of energetic trading communities from different countries contributes to
trade with those countries. Again, a number of firms trading mainly in
Asia have chosen to use Sydney as a location for their call centres and
card centres because Sydney has a large reservoir of skilled labour
speaking and writing just about every language on earth.

The argument about Australia’s carrying capacity

The anti-immigrationists make three main appeals. One is to the
perceived latent resentment of Anglo-Australians against changes to the
ethnic and cultural mix of Australia. This line of argument is
essentially an appeal to cultural ativism.

It is usually there in the arguments, but it is often veiled a bit to
avoid offending the more civilised Australians. At the popular level,
talkback radio hosts, and the One Nation bunch exploit this perceived
ativism mercilessly. At a theoretical level people such as Miriam Dixson
and Paul Sheehan implicitly invoke this perceived feeling while
ostensibly deploring it.

The second line of argument is that migration is economically bad for
Australia. That argument is unsustainable and I’ve dealt with it above.

The third argument is much more powerful and potent these days, even
with many people who are opposed to overt racism, and regard themselves
as civilised. It is expressed in the viewpoint of the organization
called Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Society and in the
political outlook of the conservative electoral formation, the
Australian Democrats, who advocate zero net immigration.

The best-known popular advocates of this point of view are Tim Flannery,
author of The Future Eaters and his disciple Paul Sheehan, author of
Amongst the Barbarians. Other people who write about these questions and
claim some expertise in the field, are the poet Mark O’Conner, the CSIRO
scientist Doug Cocks, Ted Trainer the deep ecologist, the Birrell
supporters and Katharine Betts.

Their essential argument is that Australia is a supremely eroded,
overwhelmingly arid continent, that we are already overpopulated, and
that if our present rate of population growth, the historically general
1.5 per cent to 2 per cent annually that has been the case over most of
our history, continues further, disasters will develop in the
not-too-distant future.

In one article, Flannery advances the argument that we should reduce the
population from 19 million to 12 million. One wonders whether that
includes an offer of voluntary euthanasia on his part! This line of
argument involves a very considerable virtuosity with statistics.

Cocks and Flannery, who attempt occasionally to quantify their views,
toss around various figures for arable land available in Australia. They
appear to concede that most estimates of available arable land, made by
people who know something about the subject, show that there are still
vast areas of unused arable land in Australia.

Nevertheless, they manage, by ingenious manipulation of the figures to
argue that this is really not significant, because the arable land is in
Northern Australia, the water is in Northern Australia and we should be
ultra-cautious. They continually express animosity to agriculture, which
seems to be the hallmark of quite a few modern pseudo-geographers and
pseudo-anthropologists.

There is a whole school developing of semi-scientific popular journalism
devoted to the argument that agriculture is destroying humanity.
Flannery even argues that it would be a good idea to make a large part
of Australia into an enormous ecological theme park, finding large
mammals from overseas to replace the diptodron in the ecological niche
that it used to occupy about 10,000 years ago. Flannery often seems to
prefer animals to humans. I disagree with this approach.

Past arguments about Australia’s population. Tim Flannery’s curious
legend about Griffith Taylor

Many of the ecological opponents of migration make a hero of Griffith
Taylor, a past Australian geographer. Tim Flannery paints Taylor as an
opponent of further increase in Australian population, and as someone
who shared Flannery’s view that Australia has a very small population
carrying capacity. He repeats this legend about Taylor and paints him as
a kind of martyr to the forces in Australia, “the boosters”, who in the
past favoured a large increase in Australian population, and are said to
have forced Taylor’s academic exile from Australia to North America.

A rather vigorous academic argument has developed about the long-dead
Griffith Taylor, with opponents of migration ascribing to him this
martyr status, and academic liberals and leftists responding indirectly
by drawing attention to Taylor’s mad, racist views, which he shared with
many other geographers and anthropologists of his time, of which a
representative and interesting sample is found in a letter from Ian
Castles of the Academy of Social Sciences, in the March 2000 Quadrant.

Castles says of Taylor:

The demeaning assumption was alive and well in the 1920s. Second-year
students in Australia’s first university department at the University of
Sydney were instructed by its head, Griffith Taylor, to “insert the
measurement of three skulls in a table”, using calipers, tapes and
radiometers; and were directed to a paper on the Kamilaroi tribe,
co-authored by Taylor, for a discussion of “the changes in skin-colour
and nasal index which result from hybridisation”. In 1924, Taylor
solemnly told the Royal Society of New South Wales of a teacher’s
opinion “that blacks at the age of 14 were about as intelligent as white
children at the age of 10?. In his Environment and Race, published by
Oxford University Press in 1927, Taylor asserted that the development of
man’s reasoning faculties was “correlated with the size of the brain”,
and that “we can show a continuous series of measurements leading from
the primitive Negro (69) up through the Iberian (75) group … and West
Europeans to the Alpine (85) and the Mongolian peoples.

As Ian Castles is quite right to point out about Taylor, he obviously
shared the nutty phrenological racism current among many academics in
his time and place, but this argument about Taylor is eccentric for
another, rather more basic, reason.

I have recently discovered that the Tim Flannery version of Taylor’s
views on migration and the carrying capacity of Australia just isn’t
true. I recently bought, in a package of secondhand books, Griffith
Taylor’s book in the Oxford Geographies series, the fourth edition on
Australia, published in 1925.

For that time, it’s a pretty good potted geography of Australia. What
fascinated me most is the fact that Taylor’s views on settlement and
population, as expressed in this very basic geography textbook, are
almost the opposite of the views attributed to him by Flannery.

On page 262, Taylor asserts that there are 616,000 square miles of land
suitable for close temperate settlement, 100,000 square miles of
tropical agricultural lands, 1,009,000 square miles of good pastoral
lands and 655,000 square miles of fair pastoral lands.

If anything, this is an overestimate in the opposite direction to
Flannery’s views. Taylor was also a strong advocate of a large expansion
of irrigation for agriculture, if his 1925 standard Australian geography
book is any guide. The very last paragraph in the book, the postscript,
commences with the following.

In a paper published in the American Geographical Review, July 1922, the
writer shows that the prospects of the fertile temperate regions in
Australia are very hopeful. Using the present condition of Europe (with
her 400 millions of population) as a criterion, he deduces that 62
millions of white settlers can establish themselves in eastern and
south-western Australia.

Despite his bizarre anthropological racism, Taylor wasn’t a bad prophet
on some matters. He is well known for his prediction that Australia
would have between 19 million and 20 million population in the year
2000, which has turned out to be spot on.

It is pretty fascinating the way legends grow. Rather than being a
fierce opponent of population growth as painted by Flannery, Taylor was
a bit of a “booster” himself in relation to population.

Flannery and company also praise the conservative economist Bruce
Davidson, who conducted a constant polemic in the 1950s and 1960s
against northern agricultural development, on dry economic grounds. In
this instance, their account of Davidson’s views is probably accurate.

My heroes in this area are the “boosters”: people such as Ion Idriess,
J.C. Bradfield, William Hatfield and Jack Timbery, who advocated various
and quite feasible proposals for agricultural development, particularly
in the immediate postwar period. The Snowy scheme was one product of
this kind of outlook.

In the 1970s a vigorous Australian resident opponent of Malthusianism
and supporter of Australian development and high migration was the late
Colin Clark. He had worked as an economist for the World Food
Organisation and been a major English university economist, and he
conducted a considerable argument with Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s and
1970s. His predictions about world agricultural production etc have
generally been confirmed by subsequent developments.

Ehrlich’s more alarmist predictions have repeatedly been refuted by
later events. Colin Clark had a very serious debate with Derek
Llewellyn-Jones, in the book Zero Population Growth published by
Heinemann in 1974. Most of Colin Clark’s predictions have turned out
more accurate than those of Llewellyn-Jones.

It is necessary to make some assumptions about likely future world
developments concerning food, agriculture and resources. In this field I
have found the very detailed literature of the World watch Institute of
considerable use.

While the Worldwatch Institute is, in the main, overly alarmist, it has
performed an enormous service over recent years in tracking world
developments in food production, arable land, fertiliser use and many
other important things. A very useful understanding of what is really
happening on a global scale can be acquired from the very serious
crossfire that takes place between Malthusians such as the Worldwatch
Institute and major capitalist growth advocates such as the Hudson
Institute.

The truth about likely future world developments lies somewhere between
the opposite projections of these two schools of thought, and anyone
seriously interested in these matters can derive great value from
studying the material produced by these two currents of thought, and the
debates between them.

Nevertheless, there is no serious doubt in my mind that the Worldwatch
Institute alarmism is somewhat closer to the reality than the Hudson
Institute optimism, for the medium-term future. There is likely to be a
global shortage of food and arable land and water for quite a while,
although not as catastrophic as the Worldwatch Institute believes.

Despite the short-term low world prices for commodities, artificially
created by the global financial speculations of finance capital, over
time there is likely to be enormous demand for food on a world scale,
and ultimately prices for it must rise. That reality underpins my
argument.

The second reality is that the global shortage of arable land and water
produces a situation in which Australia cannot possibly afford to
indulge the fantasy of Flannery and Paul Sheehan about making our
country a big ecological theme park. We will be under constant pressure
to develop agriculture to produce more food and we will be under
constant pressure for more migration to these shores.

Politically it is much smarter to anticipate these developments by
maintaining our historically highish, and now non-discriminatory
migration policy, and we will, for obvious reasons of survival, have to
improve our agricultural practices and remediate the Australian
environment to fulfill our global human responsibilities in food and
population.

Australia’s real carrying capacity

Stripped of all the manipulation of figures, the situation is that there
is very large unused water capacity in Australia and also a very large
amount of land that could be properly irrigated without environmental
damage, as long as careful, modern and conservative irrigation methods
are practiced.

The late Jack Kelly, an important economist who assisted in the
establishment of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, was critical of many,
initially faultily conceived, northern development schemes. Kelly knew
an enormous amount about practical irrigation, and also about the
economics of irrigation, agriculture and pastoralism.

He made a study of the Kimberleys in north-western Australia and of the
Northern Territory in the 1960s. He was sceptical about the Ord River
Dam because it was in his view on too large a scale, and in the wrong
place.

In his useful book, Struggle for the North (Australasian Book Society,
1966), he located about 50 possible places for smaller dams that could
supply water for assorted agricultural activities, irrigation
agriculture and livestock uses. Jack Kelly had a particular objection to
the way that the big pastoral companies, particularly the foreign-owned
ones, such as Vesteys, had locked up control of the strategic riverfront
grazing lands for extremely nominal rentals, and the way this monopoly
control of the strategically placed holdings held back useful
agricultural development.

He favoured small-scale, local, individually owned pastoral and
agricultural developments, and his book is an eloquent plea in favour of
such developments, and a specific blueprint for where they would be
possible. Another major set of proposals for Australian development, the
longstanding Bradfield-Ion Idriess schemes for Queensland rivers, are
from a technical and engineering point of view, quite feasible.

A number of the technical problems inherent in such schemes were solved
during the development of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and these days
most such major infrastructure projects are technically feasible.

Obviously what would be required for any of these important development
projects would be labour and credit and, as many people know, in
conditions of national emergency, credit can be created by government,
as it was during the Second World War, despite the avaricious way global
finance capital attempts to preserve for itself alone the right to
create credit.

There are enormous technical and practical problems in such agricultural
and infrastructure development, but none of them are insuperable. For
instance, the problem of salination is a question of drainage, and of
selecting suitable land for irrigation instead of land in which there
are already large amounts of salt at certain levels. (Often because this
land consists of ancient seabeds.)

One innovative solution to some salination might be Israeli-type tapping
of the ground water below the salt for irrigation, thereby lowering the
water table. The question of markets for the food will be solved in the
medium term by the inevitably increasing shortage of food on a global
scale.

Already, the very important project of the railway through western
Victoria, NSW and western Queensland to Darwin, and the other
Adelaide-Darwin project, and a Wyndham-Derby-Darwin rail project, which
could easily be devised, could create a satisfactory transport framework
for food exports to our potential Asian markets.

None of these tasks are technically impossible. The real problem is
finding the proper balance between these necessary projects and the
equally necessary dimension of preserving the natural environment in an
appropriate way.

In my view it would be possible to develop a gigantic agricultural
program of this sort, at the same time as withdrawing a great deal of
unsuitable land from scrubby pastoralism and marginal agriculture. (The
land withdrawn could be turned into national parks.)

The agricultural future of Australia lies in developing large-scale,
carefully designed, ecologically sustainable irrigation agriculture,
rather than speculative pastoralism and marginal agriculture on
semi-arid lands. Looked at in the framework of appropriate, intensive
Australian agricultural development in the future, the proposition that
we could not feed many more people is thoroughly unsound.

A recent issue of The Australian has a fascinating article about local
proposals in the Bowen area of north Queensland to develop
infrastructure, dam several rivers and commence a new major irrigation
area, which is strongly supported by the whole local community. Similar
projects are possible in many parts of northern Australia.

The example of Israel/Palestine

Tim Flannery, Doug Cocks and others make great play about the enormous
difference in the agricultural potential between Australia and Europe,
pointing to what they call ENSO or, in other words the variable
Mediteranean nature of the climate, as an enormous obstacle to
agriculture.

This comparison is a bit beside the point. Australia is obviously
different agriculturally to northern Europe because of its Mediteranean
climate. Therefore, it is useful to study and emulate the highest points
of agricultural developments in similar Mediterranean environments.

As an example, the whole area of Israel/Palestine is about 20 per cent
larger than the Sydney statistical district from Broken Bay to Loftus
and out to Katoomba.

Sixty per cent of Israel/Palestine is desert, but it supports five
million Jews and three million Arabs, with a Western diet, on a high
calorific level, and in fact produces about a net 25 per cent
agricultural surplus for export. While it is true that very special
circumstances have applied there over the last 70 years, it is a fact
that while developing agriculture to its maximum, the Israelis have
substantially remediated the land from past environmental degradation
resulting from more than 5000 years of relatively unplanned human
activity.

The technical achievements of the Israel/Palestine agricultural set-up
are of enormous practical importance in Australia, and include optimum
use of water, very frugal and effective irrigation techniques, carefully
designed arid agriculture, use of saline water in some circumstances,
etc.

Looked at in the framework of the Israel/Palestine experience and
comparing it, say, with the Sydney region, the argument over Australian
carrying capacity falls more clearly into place. The intrinsic upper
limits to Australian carrying capacity are still very far off.

The real task is to design optimum development, both to expand
agriculture and to remediate the environment at the same time, and to do
that you need more people and the creation of development credit at
government level to overcome the artificial grip on credit of the global
rentiers.

What the argument is about

It is worth noting at this point, even allowing for the aridity of the
Australian continent, and taking into account the rainfall and the
amount of well-watered land, that if Australia was to have a similar
level of population development to the United States, the population
would be 50 million.

Using a similar method of calculation, if we were to have a similar
level of population to Europe, Australia could support 130 million
people. Presently, we only use for agriculture about 11 per cent of the
water that falls on Australia as rain.

Nevertheless, political and social realities underline all arguments
about population. No one like myself, who is in favour of increased
population and the continuance of mass migration, is arguing for
anything more than the average continuance of the basic 1.5-2 per cent
annual net population increase that has been the norm over the past 200
years.

The argument is between the continuation of the normal highish migration
of a relatively new country, or the adoption of net zero population
growth, which is appropriate to overpopulated countries. As the above
figures indicate, we are a considerable distance from any situation
where a continuance of the substantial mass migration of the last 200
years could present any real threat to the interests of the Australian
people.

The footprint of cities

Another argument of the anti-immigrationists is that because most
migrants settle in cities, the footprint of cities is the problem.

There is a limited element of truth in this in Australian conditions. In
Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, due to the relatively unplanned nature
of city growth, too much agricultural land has already been lost to
urban development.

Even in these cities, however, this could be overcome for the future by
a change to forward planning for city growth. For instance, further
population expansion in Melbourne could be concentrated in the area out
towards and past Tullamarine Airport (obviously away from the flight
paths) where the land is of little agricultural potential.

In Sydney the logical places for further urban development are the
sandstone plateaus north of Hornsby and south of Loftus which, in both
instances, happen to be on major rail lines, rather than allowing
further urban sprawl on usable agricultural land in the far western
suburbs.

The Sydney region, Melbourne region and the Brisbane region could thus
be developed into mixed urban and agricultural areas, like many similar
areas in Europe and in Israel/Palestine. Australian society and the
environment will degenerate rapidly, whether we have more population or
we don’t, unless we make major and serious changes to our agricultural
and urban practices.

The real task is the adoption of appropriate technologies, including the
highest level of modern agricultural practices in all fields.

For the past 20 or 30 years many thousands of urban Australians have
been stirred by a strong desire to go back to rural life, evidenced by
the popularity of magazines such as Earth Garden and Grass Roots and the
many thousands of people who have settled in rural areas, either
individually or as part of collective experiements.

Much of this phenomenon has been marked by enormous human enthusiasm,
sometimes not enlightened by much careful scientific experiment and
enquiry. Nevertheless, the existence of this deep urge provides a basis
for possible future development in agriculture.

What is to prevent us using all the technical achievements of Israeli
agricultural practice in Australia? Other potentially useful techniques
are the well-tested, Australian-invented, P.A. Yeomans keyline water
harvesting and irrigation system, permaculture techniques, and the
cultivation of new varieties of food crops, for which the markets are
now emerging.

The possibilities in these areas are very great, and maximum government
research and development funds should be devoted to such projects. What
is so irritating about the Flannery/Cocks/O’Connor view of agriculture
is that it is almost totally static, and focussed on the past.

Unless we dramatically improve agricultural practices, the Australian
environment will suffer, regardless of the population. With appropriate
agricultural improvements, increased population will benefit the
environment.

Youth unemployment is a chronic problem in all major Australian cities.
Many young people, including many young unemployed, share the urge to
get back to the land that is fairly widespread in the population. The
federal government has exploited this, in a mildly cynical way, by
forcing unemployed youth to engage in work-for-the-dole schemes, a lot
of which involve rubbish collection and land care activities, which are
often rather cosmetic in relation to the real problems and possibilities
of agriculture.

A much more useful kind of scheme would be for the government to sponsor
the development of kibbutz-style farming experiments on usable
agricultural land on the fringes of major cities, which are in fact
locations quite close to big concentrations of youth unemployment.

Such experiments, if backed by government support and funding, could be
combined with well-organised agricultural education for unemployed
youth. Such activities would beat the hell out of some present cosmetic
make-work schemes.

In the area of the new technologies that could contribute in
agriculture, industry and other areas, to a more civilised
energy-efficient Australia, once again an Earthscan Worldwatch book is
of great assistance. This book is Factor 4 by Weizacker, Lovins and
Lovins.

This book describes a fascinating variety of technologies that have been
used successfully in different places, all of which could be adapted for
Australian use. There is no lack of possible technologies to remediate
both Australian agriculture, Australian industry and the Australian
environment.

A civilised migration policy for Australia for the 21st century

The population policy I advocate is on the following lines:

(a) No discrimination in immigration on grounds of race, religion,
nationality or political belief.

(b) A highish numerical objective at the top end of numerical objectives
since the Second World War.

(c) The maintenance of a humane mix of high-income business migrants,
skilled migrants and poorer migrants looking for a better life. To
achieve the third end, and for basic reasons of humanity, extensive
family reunion.

(d) Periodic amnesties for illegal migrants.

(e) The extension of the completely free movement that now applies to
New Zealand, to the rest of the Pacific islands, to New Guinea (the
whole island) and to Timor. The small populations of the Pacific have
been the victims of Australian imperialist activities in the Pacific and
as a proper moral compensation they should be allowed free access to
Australia.

(f) A very proactive attitude to refugees. The current crises in Timor
and Fiji and the crisis in Kosovo underline the importance of allowing
refugee migration on the widest possible scale when crises arise. Much
of the immigration history of Australia since the Second World War and,
indeed, since the Irish Famine in the 1850s, has been based on providing
safe haven for refugees. This is appropriate for a new country such as
Australia, and people who come to Australia in these circumstances
usually make a considerable effort to make a life in Australia.This
migration program should be backed up by a considerable commitment to
appropriate national infrastructure and agricultural development etc, at
the same time as a vast public program to remediate the Australian
environment.I believe that is the kind of policy on which both the
labour movement, and possibly Australian society as a whole, will
settle, and quite soon. The reason that this will be so is the effect of
the already established cultural diversity and ethnic mix in the new
Australia, and the obvious political implications of our location in the
world.The current crisis in relations with Indonesia, produced by the
necessity of defending the right of national self-determination of the
East Timorese people, heavily underlines the need for nailing down such
a general policy on migration.

Only the kind of multicultural, diverse Australia that I’ve outlined can
have a reasonable prospect of further development, or even survival, in
the rapidly changing world of the 21st century. Such an Australia will
have a bright future as a civilised example to the rest of the world
about how to handle the migration and population question in a
relatively young nation in a difficult world.

Sydney University Law School graduations as a snapshot of a new
Australia

Several close personal friends of mine have recently graduated in law
from the tough Sydney University evening course – one of the few
significant evening course left at Sydney University in these relatively
affluent times. It used to be called the Barristers Admission Board
Course and is notoriously the hardest way to do law.

My personal friends are a group of four Anglo women in their late 30s
and early and middle 40s and I have attended two of their graduations.
They have been, from my point of view, absolutely fascinating events.

Notoriously, many people drop out of this difficult course, but
nevertheless, the two graduations I attended, six months apart, averaged
140 graduates each, adding to the very large number of law graduates
crowding the marketplace.

The first interesting sociological feature was that about half of the
graduates were women. The second fascinating feature was the ethnic and
cultural mix of the graduates. Going by names, an average 40 per cent
were of some non-British migrant background: Italian, Greek, Chinese,
Indian, Arabic and many others, and another 15 per cent had recognisably
Irish names, suggesting that at least 15 per cent, and probably more
were of Irish Catholic cultural background.

Judging by appearance, an even larger percentage than the 40 per cent
had non-English-speaking backgrounds, as some people with Anglo names
were of Chinese or Indian appearance. At one of the graduations I
noticed two good-looking young men, possibly brothers, with wonderfully
exotic Indian subcontinent-sounding names, such as Fawez Nazmi Cameron
and Duncan Ismael Cameron.

Events of this sort are very emotional and moving for the graduates and
their families. The majestic, gracious and pleasant old Great Hall of
Sydney University, built by the racist British ruling class of the
colony in the 19th century, with its impressive portraits of past
vice-chancellors, on these occasions was crowded with the families of
the graduates, in their infinite, moving and boistrous variety.

One had only to look around to see our new Sydney and our new Australia
as it really is. What is striking at these events is the matter-of-fact,
routine cosmopolitanism of Sydney life. Obviously, many of these
graduates of the evening course work in law, accountancy, unions, real
estate, the public service, and even nursing and teaching.

The striking thing is the genuine mix of the new and the old. The Anglo
middle classes and commercial classes are still fairly strongly
represented. For instance there are quite a few older Anglo men who
obviously work as paralegals and have finally got their law degree, and
there are also obviously confident young women of the Anglo North Shore
middle-class, etc.

Nevertheless, the extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity of the
families and the graduates underlines the irreversible cosmopolitanism
of our new Sydney and new Australia. At these graduations it is possible
to see the future and, in terms of ethnic and cultural diversity, the
future really works. It’s also worth commenting that in terms of the
eccentric new class theory, all these graduates, by definition,
immediately enter the so-called new class, which underlines the speed
with which that class is broadening and expanding, to the point that the
new class theory becomes ridiculous.

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