Australia, New Zealand and some islands of the South seas

by Frank G. Carpenter

I am told that decisions of this sort, and the laws behind them, have bred bad feeling between wage earners and the men for whom they work. A man of means is distrusted by the working classes, not because they may envy him his wealth, but because he is an employer. The capitalist class has little sympathy for the workers, while the employed have a strong antagonism for the employer, and so the Australians are a divided people.

But there is one subject on which all Australia is agreed, and that is that the continent shall be kept exclusively a white man’s country. The workers and their unions are to a large degree responsible for this policy of a white Australia, but no party opposes it. The men in power say that Australia has learned her lesson in time, and that she will never let in cheap labour from China, Japan, and the surrounding islands which would lower wages and the standard of living. North and west of the continent are seven hundred millions of Orientals who would be glad to get out of their crowded countries into this thinly settled land of promise. Besides, all the Australians are proud of their British blood. They wish to keep it without a “taint of colour,” and seem to be willing to pay the price in a smaller population and slower development.

Still, there are some Australians who doubt the advisability of Asiatic exclusion. Is it possible, they ask, for a population of five and a half millions to hold this vast area until it is filled up with white people? Australia has less than two persons to the square mile as compared with thirty-five in the United States and three hundred and fifty-one in the United Kingdom. The Commonwealth is less thickly populated than Siberia, South Africa, or even Arabia. Moreover, most of her people are concentrated along the east, south, and southwest coasts, which contain about eighty per cent. of the population, and there is a strong tendency toward concentration in the cities. Nearly one fifth of the white inhabitants live in Sydney and forty-two per cent. are in the six capitals. Yet Australia is a land of raw materials. Her fields, farms, and mines need development, and this development calls for many people.

There are hardly any white men in the tropics of Queensland and the Northern Territory, where rich crops of cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, and fruits might be produced. Some of the capitalists say that because of the climate these regions will never be developed until coloured labour is admitted to work them.

But most Australians feel it is better to delay indefinitely making money out of the tropical lands than to allow Northern Australia to be opened to swarms of Asiatics. They point to the Negro problem in our own South as an example of what would happen if the bars were let down, and predict that conditions would eventually become much worse than any we have in the United States. They prefer to depend on selected white immigration, chiefly from Great Britain, and also on their favourable birth rate. The births now average 24.6 per thousand of population, while the death rate is only 10.8, so that Australia enjoys a natural rate of increase of 13.2 per thousand. Some of the labour bodies go so far as to oppose even white immigration, clinging obstinately to the theory that there is only so much work to be done in Australia, and that if more people are admitted there will not be enough jobs to go round.

Exclusion of the coloured races is accomplished quite simply. Immigration officers are given the authority to compel each would-be immigrant to write fifty words in any language the officials choose. Like our own Chinese immigration laws, this provision is intended to exclude labourers and artisans; it is not meant to keep out travellers, students, or merchants.

The Australian leaders emphatically deny that their policy is founded on race prejudice or persecution. They declare it is merely “a defensive measure to prevent an intolerable lowering of the standard of living.”

If some Australian labour leaders had their way, even white immigrants would be barred on the theory that this would lessen the competition for jobs and keep wages up.