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Back to Labor's Heartland

Thursday, 25th May, 2006

The one policy constant in the first 80 years of the Australian Labor Party was the white Australia policy. Socialism waxed and waned. Conscription occasionally divided. The protection of jobs and wage rates against cheaper imports brought and kept the political and union wings of the labour movement together.

The colour bar started as incidental. It just so happened that the available cheap labour being imported was Chinese. The racist trappings came later.

The massive immigration program of white workers begun by the Chifley Labor Government was accomplished without destroying working conditions. After two post-World War II decades of economic prosperity, Labor was embarrassed by a policy where only those racist trappings remained. White Australia was dropped with surprisingly little dispute.

The pattern of migration changed from all-white to a mixture of European, Middle Eastern and Asian. Any concern by Australian workers about their jobs and wages was submerged beneath the protection of an industrial relations system that fixed rates and conditions.

Imported labour there might be but it was not cheap labour.

The brief emergence of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party was a sign that the concerns that originally led to White Australia were hidden but not removed. The high unemployment of the 1990s tested tolerance.

The retreat from prominence of One Nation coincided with a return to job creation and a restored confidence that jobs and wage rates were protected.

Today that comfortable coalition of protection is again under threat – not from the import of labour but because of its price.

The combination of visas for the short term employment of so-called skilled labour and the abolition of award rates of pay for new workers is again putting the Australian social fabric under stress.

Last night the nightly Channel 7 current affairs program – one of the most viewed programs in the nation – took its cameras to the Philippines to show an event hosted by the Australian Ambassador. Hundreds of would be migrants were shown visiting stalls set up in a hall by Australian employers seeking new workers.

For those interviewed in Manila , $14 an hour to work on a West Australian building site was described as a fortune. Back in Perth a trade union official raised the fear of $14 an hour becoming the norm for existing building workers currently earning much more.

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley is beginning to see the potential of developing the link between immigration and industrial relations policy in to a vote winning issue. After a recent shadow Cabinet meeting in Adelaide , Mr Beazley announced that a future Labor Government would abolish visas allowing foreign trade workers in to Australia under the Trade Skills Training Program.

That Trade Skills Training Program, however, is but a very small part of the labour import program. Mr Beazley wants the votes but is scared of setting off a movement that will see a return of his Labor Party to its White Australian roots.

The danger for Mr Beazley is that if he does not start calling for even greater restrictions on the import of labour then someone else will. The ground is becoming fertile for a new version of One Nation.

Perhaps the answer is to clothe the policy of immigration restrictions in the language of the free market that the Government has used to justify its new industrial relations laws. As Sharan Burrow, the ACTU President recently put it in a letter to the Commonwealth Ombudsman:

"Advertising jobs at or near the award rate of course will not attract potential applicants, not when other jobs pay much more. To then use this as proof of a failure in the labour market is to create a straw man for the purpose of blowing it down!"

Yet what Ms Burrow's describes is exactly what is happening in Australia today. You will find examples in a piece if wrote for my website on 5th April, 2005 .