Joel Davis
The White Australia Policy
with Matthew Grant
Thu, Jul 27, 2023
[Joel Davis continues here in a second interview with a fascinating talk with Matt Grant, the founder of the current Australian Natives Association, about the history of nationalism in Australia and the creation of the White Australia Policy. The policy was spurred on by the huge influx of Chinese during the 1800s gold rush periods.
“We believe in the principle of a White Australia, both on economic, cultural and social grounds.”
– KATANA]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKKXsZRv9E8
[This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.]
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Published on Thu, Jul 27, 2023
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The White Australia Policy (feat. Matthew Grant)
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Matt and I do a deep dive into the rise and fall of the White Australia Policy.
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CONTENTS
White Australia Special
Understanding Australia’s White Australia Policy
Racial Conflict in Australia with Chinese and Others
The Fight for a White Australia – the Shearers Strike
The Case for a Single, Unified Border and Federation
Should Australians Fight in the Second World War?
The Jewish Invasion in Australia Post WWII
White Australia and the Jews
The Origins of Australian Multiculturalism
Returning to White Australia – Multiculturalism is Rejection of National Identity
White Australia in 2023 – Bringing Back White Identity Politics to Australia
The Issue of Racial and Cultural Difference
What’s the Essential Inheritance of the Australian Policy?
Joel and Blair Show
TRANSCRIPT
(Words: 18,026 – 1:52:39 mins)
Joel Davis: Welcome to a special. I am joined by Matthew Grant of the Australian Natives Association once again.
And today we are going to do a deep dive into the White Australia Policy, the history, the context, the ideological and political aspects of it and do a broad overview of its history, why it came into being, what its precursors were, what were the forces that ripped it apart? What were the forces that opposed it all along? And reflect upon it from the position of contemporary Australian politics and the current national situation.
Welcome Matthew to the channel. It’s a pleasure to have you.
Mathew Grant: Yeah, thanks, Joel. Thanks for having me on again. It’s good to be back and honestly, it’s been a bit long since we last had a bit of a catch up, which is a bit of a shame. But, yeah, I suffer from the same disease as many other men in the ANA. We’re all very busy men, we all have careers and families and study commitments and all the rest of it, so time is a bit of a challenge.
Before we get into it, I’m obliged to give a couple of disclaimers to align with our media policy in the ANA. So, firstly, the views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of the ANA.
And secondly, I do not exercise any control over the channel and that my appearance as a guest shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement, necessarily of any published material on the channel.
But, yeah, you’ve opened up, right.
I mean, the question of the White Australia Policy, which rotates around the Immigration Restriction Act is a huge subject. We couldn’t even do justice to it in this single podcast. There’s a litany of literature and even oral history which builds on this subject which is so crucial and so fundamental to our country.
One famous Australian Parliamentarian said:
“That in Australia, White Australia is not a mere policy, it is a religion.”
This concept of a White nation, a beacon of civilisation in the southern hemisphere, in the Pacific, really does go down to the heart of what Australia is, what Australia’s political and cultural destiny and ambition and idealism really was. So a noble subject to explore.
Joel Davis: It’s so important if you are a nationalist or if you are an identitarian, someone who listens to this channel. If you’re an Australian, you need to know your history of your own country, obviously. And a lot of these facts and elements in Australian history, there’s unfortunately a lack of knowledge. People have a very contemporary outlook on politics. They’re broadly aware of current events and global events, but the historical knowledge is lacking because this isn’t something that they teach you in school, for obvious reasons. They don’t want you to have a national historical consciousness, they don’t want you to be proud of your ancestors and of your history and understand who you are. Because if you did, then you’d probably want the White Australia Policy back and you’d probably become a White nationalist of some description.
We now live under a society in which that makes you persona non-grata, where the state declares this to be an extremist ideology, even though we’ve only had 31 prime ministers in Australia’s history. And I think it would be fair to say the first 16 up to Robert Menzies could be described as White nationalists.
[03:32]
So if you are a White nationalist, you have the majority view. If we went to heaven and we got together all the previous Australian prime ministers and all the current living ones and we sat them in a room, we would be, in the majority opinion, alongside all of our nation’s founders, all of the great men of the first half of our nation’s history.
Yet somehow this is now totally marginalised as an extreme fringe radical ideology, which is only possible due to the lack of historical consciousness in our nation.
Also, for foreign viewers, I think it’s a really instructive tale because obviously the White race is under attack globally and there are a lot of lessons in Australia’s history that you can take on for your respective national histories. Australia is perhaps the most explicit White nationalist project of any country in the world.
So I think for the future, for our people and for this idea of a global racial consciousness and so on, Australia really is a potent example of racial identitarianism.
So with that, let’s get into some of the history. And I think the logical place for us to start here is the Gold Rush of the mid 19th century. Because the Gold Rush, from the beginning to the end of the Gold Rush, our national population more than tripled. People were pouring in from all over the world to try and get a run at some of that gold, obviously, because if you strike gold, that’s your ticket out of an impoverished lifestyle, particularly at that time in history when people weren’t as well off as they are today.
And obviously the majority of the people who came to Australia, to try and take advantage of the Gold Rush were Europeans. But you also had Chinese pouring in and people of other races pouring in this was really the foundation of the racial clash.
Obviously, we had the experience of the Aboriginals and so on, but this was really the origin of dealing with non-White immigration in Australia and the formation of a racial politics in the country.
So maybe I’ll throw it to you Grant.
Mathew Grant: Yeah, well, no worries. Well, one little contrarian thing for you is I actually did learn this in school, all the way through primary school and high school, which wasn’t too long ago. This was actually a not unreasonable size of our curriculum. The question of the Gold Rush. The question of White Australia.
[05:55]
So I guess I’ve been disproportionately blessed when compared to a lot of other people I’ve met around Australia who never really touched on much of this history. I was very fortunate to get a first bite of it in my schooling. Obviously, it was all tinged with this kind of negative accusations that the White Australia Policy was kind of premised on bigotry and an unreasonable hatred of foreigners.
But just to address that really quickly before I touch on the Gold Rush. Even at the time of the Gold Rush, this was a very simple question that White European descent miners in the country of New South Wales and Victoria were being quite literally overrun and outnumbered, displaced by Chinese migrants. You can’t blame the Chinese migrants escaping from the poverty of their own home country to come and try find their fortunes here.
[Miners at Miners at Fairleys Creek, Buckland Valley gold mines]
But one particular area called Buckland River*, there was a gold mining settlement there which was quite large, and it homed around, 2,000 Chinese settlers and 500 European descent settlers. Buckland River actually descended into a violent riot on the 4th of July where the local miners had thrown all the Chinese out of the town.
[* During the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s the Buckland Valley was home to several thousand Chinese miners. On 4 July 1857, following a meeting at a Buckland Valley public house, approximately 100 European miners violently expelled most Chinese miners from the area in an event referred to as the Buckland Riot. The Buckland River was rich in alluvial gold and was dredged extensively in the 19th century. Source: Wikipedia]
According to history, the Chinese had started building their own temple to their own pagan foreign gods. And this very deeply begrieved the Europeans there because they hadn’t even managed to build themselves a church yet.
So when news of this new temple got around, the people were absolutely outraged and began an act of overwhelming kind of coercion. There was some violence, there was some injuries, but principally, they just told all these Chinese people to pack their bags, and they all left. They were force marched out of the town and then they burnt down all the Chinese buildings and occupations, so it was deserted after that.
But the Gold Rush was a tremendous period in history.
So this was before Federation, this is before Australia had a single united federal border. You had the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia. Queensland and South Australia had wide open borders. They had no racial policies, no interest in having a strongly enforceable border. And that as well, they actually really struggled to have an enforceable border just due to the sheer scale of the borders. A lot of boats could land in those colonies without much impedance and people could travel overland.
In New South Wales and in Victoria in 1861 is really when the racial struggle began kicking off. And that was in Young in New South Wales, which formerly then was known as Lambing Flat.
In that time, you had all these Chinese migrants, principally coming into the gold fields. They were making all the best findings. They were washing their dirty clothes and sluicing and dirtying the rivers so Europeans couldn’t drink the clean water. There was a lot of cultural, I suppose, anxiety of the scale of the Chinese migration.
[09:39]
And then there was, in fact, just the basic incompatibility of the two cultures. And in Young, it was in February, 1861, that they basically had another kind of like the Buckland River event, they had another violent episode. This one was particularly more violent.
[Image: The Roll Up Banner with which a mob of 2,000–3,000 men rallied and attacked Chinese miners at Lambing Flat in June 1861. The banner is displayed in Lambing Flat, now known as Young.]
However, I think the Chinese put up a bit more of a fight, which resulted in some deaths and some injuries. The founder of the Labour Party and the Australian Workers Union, William Spence, wrote in his book Australia’s Awakening that:
“They drove the Chinese off the field, some of the pig tailed heathens losing their lives!”
It was quite a violent episode, which resulted in the police trying to arrest a great number of the European rioters or instigators of this kind of rebellion. In response to that, the rioters burnt down the police station and the police narrowly escaped with their lives and had to charge to the nearest station at the barracks in Goulburn, which was quite a distance away from Young.
So it was a very heated, a very spectacular event in Young which really demonstrated the anger, but also the willpower and the will of these miners to maintain these kind of higher standards on the gold fields which had been subverted by these cheap Chinese migrants.
Joel Davis: Yeah, I think many commentators view this as the origin point, essentially, of White nationalism in Australia, or nationalism, I mean, calling it “White nationalism” is somewhat reductive in the sense that the term nationalism doesn’t really make any sense without reference to a people of shared ancestry.
So obviously, that has racial connotations. And in English, back at that time, the term “nation” and the term “race” would have been used interchangeably by most people, unlike conventions in the contemporary era. So they would not have really been able to understand nationalism as anything but, quote, unquote, “White nationalism”. They would not be able to conceive of a different kind of nationalism in those days, and we really shouldn’t be able to today either, except for the abuse that has been done to our language.
So you have these acts passed in the mid 1850s, I think 1855, in Victoria 1861, in New South Wales to restrict the influx of Chinese immigration, obviously in response to this general unrest.
And at that time, obviously, these are all colonies of the British Empire, and the British government and its representatives weren’t exactly enthused. Britain’s then colonial secretary in 1861, when the New South Wales Parliament did pass these laws, Lord Carnarvon, he was not pleased. He stated that, quote:
“That exceptional legislation intended to exclude from any part of Her Majesty’s dominions the subjects of the state at peace with Her Majesty is highly objectionable in principle.”
And the pressure was put on after the Chinese stopped flowing in to rescind the laws, and they were, they were actually repealed.
So from this very early origin, there was, from the British imperial influence, resistance to this organic movement of Australian nationalism in the general population. They were willing to make concessions to it, obviously, to maintain order and political stability, but they weren’t exactly supportive.
[13:26]
And that was a trend that you see continually from then onwards. Because from the British perspective, Australia wasn’t genuinely a nation. There was the British race, many of whom just happened to be in colonial Australia. And Australia was an economic zone as far as they were concerned. And they were more interested in protecting the interest of wealthy industrialists and other capitalist interests who benefited from importing cheap non-White labour into the country.
In 1876, the Queensland Parliament passed a Bill to amend the Goldfields Act, which would basically put a higher licensing fee upon Asians in order to discourage them from coming into Australia as well and encourage them to go home. The ones that were already there. And the British appointed governor of Queensland reserved the bill, prevented it from being passed and sent it to the British government. They didn’t approve it and the Bill didn’t become law.
So they’re already intervening here.
And this is important in understanding the context leading up to Federation and so on and the emergence of the Australian labour movement and this perception that capitalist interests and British imperial interests were the main enemies basically of Australian nationalism.
Mathew Grant: Yeah, it’s exactly right! I guess, Australia was to them just an economic zone. It was a place where you could raise sheep, wheat and sugar cane, make good money and go take your money back home to England and have a good time. Charles Pearson writes in National Life and Character in 1893:
“The fear of Chinese immigration, which the Australian democracy cherishes and which the Englishmen at home find hard to understand, is in fact the instinct of self preservation. Quickened by experience, we know that coloured and White labour cannot exist side by side. We are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year’s surplus of population. And we know that if national existence is sacrificed to the working of a few mines and sugar plantations, it’s not the Englishmen in Australia alone, but the whole civilised world that will be the losers.”
In a similar stead Teddy Roosevelt, the American President did a review of Pearson’s work and he also formed the view that not only the United States, but Australia were both subject to international finance oligarchs that these English, usually residing in England, persons of financial means, were using our countries to make money. And slavery in the south of the United States was a product of that process.
[Image: The Port Phillip Gold Mining Company’s claim and the township of Clunes]
In the same way, in Australia, the importation of Chinese was used heavily. So back in the 19th century there was a lot of cases like that. So one instance in the town of Clunes in Victoria, there was a gold mine there that was making money. There was no issues. It was a commercially viable operation.
[16:36]
However, the shareholders decided that they wanted to pay less for labour and so they actually brought in three or four horse carriages full of Chinese labourers and intended to sack all of the Australian and European descent miners from the gold mine. And this town of Clunes the entire town, men, women and children physically mobilised themselves with weapons and blockaded the roads coming into the town.
So the horses that were drawing these Chinese scabs, as we would call them, non-unionised labourers, these Chinese scabs were stopped on the road, and they had actually police escort as well. It’s a famous story I always make reference to because the policeman bore his rifle and pointed it at a woman, and the woman picked up a rock and was about to throw it at the policeman and said:
“I’d rather be shot than starved!”
And this was the dire situation that these people in Victoria and people in towns and regions all around Australia faced, that they were looking down the barrel of being completely replaced by Chinese scab labourers who would work for a bowl of rice a day. And would not work at European standards of work. They wouldn’t work for a fair rate.
And this actually manifested in a whole bunch of events. I won’t get into the full detail of all of them. But similar situation in 1878, you had the maritime strike, where basically a large Australasian steam navigation company sacked all of their White sailors and replaced them with Chinese sailors, which resulted in other riots and a strike which were successful. Thank heavens.
There was also the black legging for Polynesian labourers in Queensland for sugarcane.
A lot of people in that time were convinced that White men of European stock could not settle the tropics. I mean, Marcus Clark, Charles Pearson, Teddy Roosevelt, they all kind of subscribe to this concept that warm climates are unsuitable for people of northern European stock.
[Image: The Australasian, 13 March, 1897, p. 4, advertisement indicating ‘European Labour’ made furniture.]
So they were bringing in Polynesian labourers to Queensland. During the same time as the gold rush, unsuccessful Chinese miners who didn’t find any goods on the gold fields ended up taking over the Victorian manufacturing industries, primarily in furniture. So you had lots of backyard furniture factories that were sweating 70 hours week, undercutting the wages and conditions of Australian labourers in factories in Victoria. Which actually resulted in a few riots and some legislation which required all furniture be stamped if it was made by European or Chinese labourers.
And all of this kicking off around the 1860s, 1870s, finally culminated in the Great Shearers Strike in 1891. So William Spence, the founder of the Labour Party, says in his book Australia’s Awakening:
“When they were going to fill White men’s places with Chinese and further insisted on freedom of contract, which means non-unionised agreements, shearers and shed hands had no alternative but to go on strike.”
So 1891 saw probably the largest industrial action in Australian history, resulting in the army having to be mobilised because there was actual fears of a genuine civil war and a revolutionary army of thousands of shearers armed with rifles taking over the colony of Queensland.
[20:38]
So there was a lot of stuff going on, just after the gold rush and during the gold rush, which was really testing multiculturalism, the earliest form of it. I mean, principally dealing with Chinese migrants. But it was very clear across the board that this was detrimental to the national health. There was a lot of labour struggle against it. But there was also liberal thinkers who were uninvolved with the Labour movement that were staunchly in favour of this principle of a White Australia. Henry Parks was probably one of the first of those leading men.
But in the Inter-Colonial Conference of 1888, a lot of colonial Parliamentarians had come together to meet and they all agreed that the further introduction of Chinese to Australia was going to be detrimental to the country.
And as you rightfully said, they all tried to legislate to this end and the Crown refused to give royal assent to them because they, at the time, had colonised India. They had millions and millions and millions of Indians that were technically British subjects. The Englishmen at home didn’t understand the importance of these racial issues because they’d never experienced it.
And so they, withheld this legislation, …
Joel Davis: The original NIMBY* shit-libs!
[* The phrase “not in my backyard,” shortened to “NIMBY,” seems to have appeared first in the mid-1970s. It was used in the context of the last major effort by electric utilities to construct nuclear-powered generating stations, especially those located in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and Midland, Michigan. Source: Britannica]
Mathew Grant: Yeah, exactly! Just had no idea. Yeah. I mean, Henry Higgins, the High Court Justice and Parliamentarian, said that:
“The principle of a White Australia really came about when people had to rub shoulders with foreign labour and compete with them.”
But the rich people, the people in the agricultural societies and chambers of commerce, they don’t understand because they’ve never had to compete with them. And even better, they profiteer off scab cheap labour from overseas.
So it’s a fascinating bit of history. I mean, it caused a lot of violence, a lot of grief, a lot of people were displaced, a lot of people lost their work and employment. But it also created this national psyche. It forced these people of different European descent and even inter-British cultures, Irish and Welsh and English and Scots. All these people had to unify under a single concept of a White Australia that’s a European descent, Australian ethnic identity, which would repel these cheap foreign invaders.
JF Archibald, the publisher of The Bulletin, the old newspaper, he’s attributed to saying:
“By the term ‘Australian’, we mean not just those who are merely born in Australia, but all White men who come to these shores with a clean record and who leave behind them the memory of class distinction and religious difference in the Old World, all men who place the happiness of their adopted lands before imperialism are Australian.”
So you saw this ethno-genesis kicking off around the same time of all these struggles against Chinese labour.
[24:07]
Joel Davis: Yeah, and obviously that is so relevant I think in our time, it’s only become more relevant, that concept. I mean, it wasn’t just the economic struggles, although we have to remember that it’s not like today where the idea of having to compete with foreign labour is annoying, but there’s so many safety nets and comforts in modern society. I mean, it was a life or death matter in those days to find gainful employment.
There was no Social Security systems established. You really were on your own either as an individual, as part of a community. But there wasn’t this big state bureaucracy, there wasn’t all of this modern social architecture,
Mathew Grant: No Fair Work Commission.
Joel Davis: Yeah, there are two components. You got the more kind of trade Unionist types who you mentioned William Spence, who is one of the major trade Unionist figures in this late 19th century Australian nationalism and went on to be influential after federation as well. And quote from him to get a feel for their politics. He’s saying this, by the way, while conceding that, yeah, there are some liberal conservative elements in Australian politics that also did politically support the White Australia Policy. But his stance is:
“That the anti-socialist is invariably (as I quote) the most unpatriotic person to be found. He belongs to the Stinking Fish Party. If he cannot get his own stupid way, he denounces the country in which he has done so well. The bedrock of the cry for a colour line across the continent so that anti-socialists could boss N-words and yellow men is found in the anti-socialist nature. He is a born tyrant and as the White Australian will not stand his tyranny, he must have a N-word to order about. There is no patriotism in the anti-socialist press, hence it barracks for anything the capitalist crowd asked for.”
So there was this, obviously from the Labourerists, this keen sense of class warfare and a very racial concept of trade unionism, as you mentioned.
This idea that there’s something about being a Whiteman was having this collective mentality. And people often flip that these days and talk about how to be a Whiteman is to be individualistic and that all the other races are more collectivist than us. But they had this inverse perception that it was actually the Whiteman who had this inherent virtue that “all for one and one for all” was their kind of principle and as opposed to the pursuit of individual advantage, this kind of rejection of bourgeois morality.
So that was a strong component. Obviously, the Australian Labour Party was formed out of that worldview and that tendency.
[26:36]
But at the same time you also had more liberal nationalist elements like HP Higgins, who went on to become Attorney General and was massively influential in the early politics of Federal Australia and the formation of the White Australia Policy. A staunch advocate.
You have Alfred Deacon, Australia’s second Prime Minister, one of the most influential prime ministers in Australian history. Really set the tone for the early phase of Australian politics, the so-called Australian Settlement. Alfred Deacon, in his maiden speech to Parliament, declared:
“Australia to be an Aryan Christian nation.”
His racial Unitarianism and his religious faith were really front and centre of his political project. They were the Protectionist Party. So they opposed themselves to the pro-British Empire free traders. They aligned themselves with colonial White Australians and their interests, but they weren’t so much trade Unionists. Instead they had this liberal, democratic conception of nationalism. But nevertheless they were also integral in the formation of White Australia. But we’re going to get into the story of Federation now. I’ll turn it back to you.
But once Federation forms, the Labour Party comes to be really the front and centre advocates of the White Australia Policy. But you do have a lot of these other more centrist national elements that are also supportive. But maybe to turn it back to you on the logic in Federation and the forces that pushed for it. Because Australia didn’t have what the Americans had, a revolution and Republicanism. Maybe in retrospect, maybe we should have, considering we ultimately haven’t protected White Australia and White Australia was being ripped away from us. But at the time, what were the kind of practical considerations?
Obviously there was a logic of entering into an agreement with the Empire where the Empire would make concessions and allow us essentially to have our White nationalist thing, but still conciliatory in many respects to British business interests and imperial interests, foreign policy interests and so on.
And there was a tension there. Was that because we felt we didn’t have the capacity to stage a revolution? Or was there a sense of:
“Well, there’s benevolence and that we can do this in a clean political way?”
Also at the time, you have the context of Charles Henry Pearson, his conception, which you alluded to before, of the Whiteman under siege:
“That the world wasn’t destined to be ruled by these White, globe spanning empires forever. But that this was an aberration in history and that the vitality of the Anglo Saxon race and some of the other European races was limited and would burn itself out in cosmopolitanism and so on and declining birth rates. And the yellow races and other races would rise and they would become peers on the international stage and take their countries back from colonial domination.”
[29:17]
He was obviously quite prescient with that because that’s literally how the 20th century played out. And he feared forces of misgegenation would be existential for the White race, and that therefore an explicit politics of racial preservation and explicit White nationalism was necessary because he had that, as you mentioned, this view that the Whiteman really only belonged in the temperate zones and that living in northern Queensland would be a problem. He didn’t predict that we could adapt to those environments, which obviously kind of seems silly now to a certain extent. But nevertheless, the view was well, in Australia and in North America, we have these temperate zones where the Whiteman can set up states that have the explicit goal of racial self preservation to secure a future for our people and way of life despite changing global conditions.
That’s important to recognise as well that the White Australia Policy wasn’t just based in some kind of contemptuous hatred for other races, but was based in an existential requirement, a struggle from the very beginning. Whether you’re talking about the early Australian labour movement or talking about nationalist intellectuals and political figures and so on.
They were big picture people and they obviously were very happy with White culture and the White way of life and wanted to preserve it. But they didn’t necessarily have this seething hatred or even this will to dominate other races, but actually they wanted separation for the preservation of our way of life down the generations.
And so this is actually the opposite of a supremacist worldview, it’s a separatist worldview and it’s a worldview that actually gave respect to these foreign races by saying:
“Well, we don’t actually anticipate our capacity to dominate you is going to be successful or even desirable. Instead, we recognise that we can’t dominate the world entirely and that we need ethno-states or racial states in certain pockets of the world.”
With all of that context, what’s your impression of the key forces leading up to Federation? Why we went for a conciliatory approach to the British Empire? Was it just through sentimental attachment to the mother country and the fact that we were ultimately sons of the British Isles, or was there more to the story than that?
[31:16]
Mathew Grant: Yep, I guess starting off moving towards Federation. So you had Henry Parks. He was our main man in New South Wales, a Parliamentarian. And to touch on that subject of racial bigotry, I agree, the White Australia Policy was absolutely never premised on this concept that we just hate everyone else and therefore we don’t want to let them in. There was serious qualities to the idea of the policy.
Henry Parks, in his second reading of the Chinese Restriction Bill in the New South Wales Colonial Parliament, said:
“They are not an inferior race, they are a superior set of people, a nation of old and deep rooted civilisation. It is because I believe the Chinese to be a powerful race, capable of taking a great hold upon this country, and because I want to preserve the type of my own nation, I am and always have been opposed to the influx of Chinese. I contend that if this young nation is to maintain the fabric of its liberties unassailed and unimpaired, it cannot admit into its population any element that of necessity must be of an inferior nature and character. In other words, I’ve maintained at all times that we should not encounter or admit amongst us any class of persons whatever, whom we are not prepared to advance to all our franchises.”
So basically, Henry Parks, he was a great thinker of his time. He was known as the “Father of Federation”. He was the one who made Federation very politically popular. He campaigned on the issue.
So New South Wales had at this time managed to introduce a poll tax. So if you were Chinese and you were getting off a ship in Sydney Harbour, there’d be a quite heavy financial cost to you getting off the boat. You were allowed in, but it would come at a cost. Queensland and South Australia did not have this. And at the time they were basically skipping the poll tax by landing in Queensland and South Australia and walking across the border.
So we had this issue where Victoria and New South Wales, who were trying to protect their ethnic homogeneity, were being swamped by Chinese migrants through Queensland and South Australia. So it became increasingly evident that there needed to be a single, unified national border Australia and the Pacific Ocean, and that every colony in the continent should be part of this one single nation which has a single immigration policy and a single controllable border. This was a big area of the Australian Natives Association platform as well.
So the ANA was started in 1871 and it was in favour of the native born European descent people of Australia.
And as part of that, it was a staunch advocate of a White Australia and of Federation. Because they saw that getting that single, unified border is going to be the thing that prevents us from becoming another melting pot like had been seen in the United States.
The honourable King O’Malley, who became the minister for home affairs in one of the early Australian Parliaments, said:
“If the Australian people had only lived in the southern states of America, as I have, and had seen the dire results of the present mingling of the Africans with the Whites, they would put their feet down and say, ‘We are not going to leave such an unholy problem behind for future generations to solve’.”
And in the same vein, Jack Beasley, who was a New South Wales Parliamentarian in the 1920s, said:
“It’s possible to live on the highest terms of mutual respect with one’s neighbour, whilst recognizing that it would be destructive of all harmony to invite him to become a permanent resident in one’s household.”
So you had these ideas. We Australians of European stock, we are in the Pacific, we have Asian neighbours, we should be friends with them, but at the same time we should recognise it would be destructive of all harmony. These people don’t share the same heritage as us. They did not adopt Magna Carta, they did not adopt the Act of Settlement, they did not adopt Roman law, Roman principles of equity and justice. They are completely alien to us.
And we talk about White nationalism and why it’s important to be White. And I think one of the great reasons for that is because we are actually related by blood to the people who died for these high principles of civilisation, which we hold very dear.
So these Asian migrants, as Henry Parks was saying, they have alien concepts to us. They are not going to develop the same brand of civilisation which we hold so dear. They have their own ways, and their own ways are definitely noble to them and something that they would venerate. But to us, we have a higher calling based on our own heritage and based on our own concepts of civilisation and justice and equity and all the rest of it.
So the march towards Federation was really for that single, unified border. James Stewart said in 1901, and this is during the debates on the Immigration Restriction Act:
“We do not desire to keep out those coloured people simply because they’re inferior to us, but because for racial, social, and economic reasons, we cannot permit them safely to enter. With regards to race, we cannot mix with them. There is no natural affinity between them and us. And if an attempt were made to confide them and us in one bottle, so to speak, one or the other must be precipitated to the bottom. A compacted, homogeneous community cannot be formed out of such heterogeneous compounds. The thing ought not to be attempted because it is absolutely impossible!”
“With regards to the social aspect of the question, these people are brought up under institutions entirely different from ours. Their religion, position and customs are different. I should be a traitor to my country, to my race, and to those of our ancestors who have conferred benefits upon us. If I were a party to anything which would allow these Asiatics to come here and destroy in one fell swoop all the efforts of centuries. For these reasons, I think we are all agreed that the coloured man must be kept out, whether he is a Japanese, a Chinaman, or an African.”
So I think in general, ideological terms, aside from the Labour issues of wages and unionism, the intellectual concept was that White people of European descent, are in fact inheritors of political and social and cultural institutions, dating all the way back through from Rome up to now, that were noble, that needed to be defended, and would be absolutely destroyed by an influx of foreigners.
As it said, that Chinese could take this country with a single year’s surplus population. I think all of the founders understood and realised that a non-European descent majority in Australia would mean a death of all the legal and political institutions which we hold so dear and we think are crucial to our civilisation.
[38:53]
Now, how this relates to the British Empire? As I said previously, the British Empire at the time had millions of people in India. Before Federation Natal had attempted to – this is in South Africa – the Natal colony attempted to have an explicit racial immigration policy. They wanted to preserve Natal for people of European stock, and the British refused to give them royal assent in similar ways that they refused us.
But at the same time, Australia was very low in population. It didn’t have great industries and military resources at its disposal. A lot of the early Parliamentarians and people pushing for Federation understood that the protection of the British fleet, the British Navy, was what’s going to allow us to have a White Australia, that the millions of desperate Asians to our north would not be able to be repelled by an Australian independent army.
So even those with Republican sympathies in the Labour Party all acknowledged that the defense of Australia really relied on the British Navy.
And so we had to keep our ties to Britain quite neat and tidy.
So that was that.
I mean, there’s definitely the ethnic solidarity thing as well, I mean, we were being constantly populated by first generation British migrants who did feel an affinity with the United Kingdom and felt that that was home. I mean, it is also our heritage. I mean we are predominantly of British extraction in Australia, and I think people feel, the practical side of it. We needed the British Navy, but also the cultural side of it that we felt ourselves of European British extraction particularly.
I think a lot of people hadn’t come to grips with how badly the British Parliament and the Crown had really betrayed our interests in terms of an immigration platform.
But as Dr. William Maloney said in 1912, this is before World War I kicks off:
“If England were to go down, the result would be disastrous to Anglo-Celtic Saxon race the whole world over. We should be rendered helpless against one of the greatest fighting nations the world has ever known. I shall never utter a word derogatory of the Japanese as a nation, but what could we do unaided against such a nation?”
So at Federation time, there was the acknowledgment. We finally had the ability to make our own laws. The Crown could withdraw Royal Assent and that was a real threat. So even at the time of the Immigration Restriction Act, even though a lot of Parliamentarians wanted an explicit racial law, and that’s constitutional under Section 51 of the Constitution, there was still a great fear that the Crown wouldn’t give it royal assent and therefore it wouldn’t become law for fear of offending all of the Indians in the Empire.
So, yeah, there was a very kind of vexed issue, but it’s multi pronged, definitely, the practical consideration. We need the British Navy to defend a White Australia and we also feel a cultural and heritage affinity with it.
And a lot of people were genuinely loyal to the Crown. So those are, I suppose, the main considerations.
[42:19]
Joel Davis: It is, I think, important, though, to recognise that pretty much all factions at the time bar, very few, were committed to White Australia. And that was really the guiding principle, this principle that we need to preserve our people and our race on this continent and make this the Whiteman’s continent, was a prevailing bipartisan stance. And the debate was how do we go about that best.
The defense of Australia, the geopolitical angle obviously is vital and that obviously plays a massive role in first half of the 20th century as we go to two wars for the British Empire.
Yeah, I think people don’t really realise now that at the time of Federation we didn’t truly become an independent nation state and not just in the basic sense that it is now where obviously we still share a head of state with the United Kingdom. But Australia was originally still defined as a colony, it was defined as a “self governing colony” according to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, which was an act in British Parliament.
From the British standpoint, they were happy to go along with it because it improved the ease of administration that they just had this one central Australian government to deal with, rather than all of these separate colonies to liaise with. But ultimately the British government still had oversight over the Australian Constitution, which they did interfere with after it was approved by an Australian referendum. And most of their interventions were either to serve their foreign policy interests.
So you have the alliance with Japan that was brokered in 1904, which really perturbed us because the Japanese were seen as our main national security threat in our region, yet the British were getting in bed with them because they feared the rise of the Germans. The unified Germany became their obviously direct rival in Europe and so they didn’t want to commit as many forces to maintaining their position in the Asia Pacific region.
And so the solution to that was to make an alliance with the most powerful rising power in the region, which at the time was the Japanese, fresh off defeating the Russians in a war, and defeating the Chinese and they had all these expansionist aims and so on.
Obviously we saw how that ended up playing out in the Second World War where we ultimately had to confront them.
[44:25]
But not only was the foreign policy of the United Kingdom and this Britain centric foreign policy that they had where Australia wasn’t seen as a partner so much as a colony for the first few decades of our existence, but know you had all these wealthy British capitalists, many of them of jewish extraction, who were based out of the City of London, who had extensive investments in Australia. And those investments often also provided them with an interest in coloured immigration. So that produced also a tension. But primarily it was the foreign policy of the British. They didn’t want to anger the Japanese. The Japanese were not fans of Australia having explicit racialist laws on the books preventing the immigration of all non-White races.
And so the advisement that was given by the British government was that we do a dictation test. So instead of having an explicit law there were many elements in the Labour Party, I think the entire Labour Party actually at the time and many other elements in the Australian government or the Australian political establishment, who wanted an explicit racial law about who can come to Australia, who can become a citizen, who can enter the country. They even wanted to put it into the Constitution, many of them, but that was declined.
And instead they were advised to have a dictation test where basically, if someone tried to immigrate to Australia who was seen as undesirable, which basically meant that they weren’t White, they probably also did it to many Slavic and Mediterranean types, because at that time they had a very Anglo conception of who we were. And maybe they were more amenable to some German immigrants or some Scandinavian immigrants, but generally speaking, they weren’t huge fans of jewish immigrants, they weren’t huge fans of Italian immigrants or Polish immigrants or anything like that, even. But basically, they had a dictation test which could be given in any arbitrary language they could choose from.
So if they didn’t like someone, they could just give it to them in a language they knew they didn’t understand to ensure that they would fail.
So it was a kind of bureaucratic trickery where the White Australia Policy was enforced basically through bureaucratic processes, rather than through an explicit legal framework. And many people found that to be somewhat offensive to the Australian sensibility. We like to be direct and upfront. But the Japanese were not too happy about it. And so to maintain the alliance, that was what was necessary.
And then you mentioned we get to the First World War. Obviously, Australia commit incredible forces. 60,000 Australians died fighting for the British Empire in the First World War, which was more than double the Australian deaths in the Second World War, I believe, just to give an idea of the scale. And we did that because we wanted a seat at the table in the Empire. We wanted to elevate our position in the Empire, to get more influence in the Empire, and so we wanted to prove ourselves.
[47:16]
So the logic was, with the Australian political establishment, by going hard for the Empire and showing that you need us. When you actually go to war, you want the Australians there fighting on the battlefield, defending the Empire. And we wanted to earn our position through that. And it did succeed to the extent that Billy Hughes, the Nationalist Prime Minister at the time, was able to be a key figure at the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the war. And the Japanese, as an ally in the First World War, were angling for the introduction of a racial equality clause to be accepted by the League of Nations, whereby laws that were explicitly discriminatory on racial grounds be abolished. Billy Hughes fought against that tooth and nail and succeeded partially by spreading fear mongering propaganda around the legislation in the United States of America to create domestic pressure upon Woodrow Wilson, at the time the American President, to acquiesce. And so they did.
It was also interesting that at the time, we demanded Papua New Guinea from the Germans who had taken it.
And interestingly, we actually had told the British before the Germans took New Guinea, that they were about to and that we wanted their support to defend it due to fears of having hostile powers on our doorstep. And the British told us not to worry about it and ultimately that it wasn’t their problem. We were right, the Germans took it.
And another key factor into our participation, our extensive participation in the First World War, was the sense that if the Germans were to win, that perhaps Australia would be a bargaining chip to the British, that they would hand us over to the Germans in a wartime settlement and we would start taking German immigrants. Considering how things have played out historically, maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad! Maybe it would have been better if we had lost World War I [chuckling] and were handed over to the Germans. White Australia would probably still exist today had that happened in that alternative timeline. But from the standpoint of that time, you can understand as proud Anglos why we didn’t want that eventuality.
But nevertheless, due to these foreign policy concerns, which were very real, we were all the way with the Empire, obviously, up until the Second World War. Maybe the story of the Second World War would be better if I pass that one over to Grant.
Mathew Grant: Obviously we go hard to defend England. That way the British Navy isn’t knocked out of the universe, so we’re protected against Asia.
Along comes World War II and the Japanese are pouring down through Asia. They’ve taken China, they’ve used Australian steel to do it. Thank you, Bob Menzies!
And then they started marching towards Singapore, which is a great trading outpost of the British Empire at the time.
Now, the British absolutely botched the defense of Singapore! And we had thousands and thousands and thousands of Australian soldiers posted there under British commanders.
[50:05]
And basically what happened was they had all their guns pointed out to the sea, out into the harbour, expecting a Japanese naval assault. But they landed themselves over thousands of bicycles and little wagons through the land access to the back of Singapore and began a siege of the city. Some Australian divisions valiantly held them back for a couple of days, but suddenly the Japanese were knocking on the door, and the British generals actually thought that urban combat was not gentlemanly and therefore immediately surrendered.
And all of the British and Australian soldiers were force marched to POW camps and died in enormous numbers. I mean, just on the march alone, thousands and thousands of men were killed.
And then they spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, where they were starved and tortured. And I’m sure everyone knows the story, but it was at that time, I think, Australia really came to the reckoning that the British were out of the game. They’d pull the plug on Asia and we were on our own.
So Bob Menzies tremendously lost the election. In comes John Curtin and the Labour Party, which mobilised the entire country immediately putting everyone on food rations and portioning, nationalizing industry, bringing online an Australian war machine to produce weapons and tanks and planes to defend Australia. Massive numbers of Australians were mobilised to fight.
And we were already in the war with the Germans over in Europe. And Australia had a lot of soldiers, a lot of assets over in North Africa. And immediately John Curtin makes the command:
“We’re coming back.”
And the British Parliament and Winston Churchill were sulking and whinging:
“You have to defend us! We’re going to get crushed by the krauts in Europe!”
And Curtin just said:
“No! We have to bring the soldiers back to Australia, to defend from Japan.”
And this really is reflective of the psyche of the British at the time:
“These colonials, they belong to us, they’re our pawn on the chessboard. We need to protect the UK from the krauts! Who cares what happens to this far off backwards colony?”
But anyway, Curtin stood his ground. The Australians’ assets in Europe mobilised, got on a bunch of transport ships, and they were on the Pacific. And suddenly Winston Churchill gets on the foghorn to the captain and commands him to turn around and land all the troops in Ceylon to defend India from the Japanese invasion. Because Churchill and the British Parliamentarians and the other financial interests in Britain were more concerned about their financial interests in India being lost to the Japanese than actually the defense of Australia and the White European descent people in Australia.
[53:11]
Fortunately, through a couple of very powerfully worded cables from our Prime Minister, John Curtin, the commander of the ship did end up bringing Australia’s troops and assets back to Australia, to begin preparing for a defense in Papua New Guinea, which we’d freshly won from the Germans. Thanks to the great foresight of Billy Hughes, that Papua New Guinea would be the buffer zone between us and the foreseen Japanese opponent.
I mean, long before I read you that quote before about what would happen if England fell and know Japan is our greatest adversary in the Pacific. Australian Parliamentarians, generals, and all the rest of it, had been anticipating this war since around 1910, even earlier.
So everyone was thinking about it. And the occupation of Papua New Guinea was an excellent play to see the defense of Australia from the Japanese.
And so the war proceeds.
I mean, the war has its own history, I suppose. But the impact, the policy implications to the White Australia Policy. By the time we’ve won World War II, it was with the help of the United States and not with the United Kingdom. I mean, not only did the UK absolute scum born to rule generals, surrendered our soldiers in Singapore and led to thousands of needless deaths, then refused to relinquish our soldiers from the European campaign. Not only did they do those things to a great grievance to our country, even after all the sacrifice we gave them in World War I. Just absolutely no respect! After that it was recognised that the UK could not be relied upon for our national defense and that the United States was our new partner.
But in addition to that, it really just created this great sense of anxiety. After the Japanese steel had separated many Australian heads from many shoulders and many nurses were kidnapped and sold into sex slavery or shot, Australia became even more anxious of Asia than it ever had.
But it began to manifest in a different way at the end of the war. It was a lot of Parliamentarians were desperately trying to befriend and get on really good terms with Asiatics. And that really started the most formal way with the Colombo Plan, which was this concept of bringing in Asian students so that they could learn at our universities, become up-skilled, go back to their home countries, improve their home countries, so that the desperation of Asia stops looking over to Australia with its starvation in its eyes.
But at the same time that they would be an appreciation that the Asiatics that returned home building their countries would come back from Australia with a favourable impression of Australia and would be pro-Australian.
So the whole dynamic goes from isolation, having no friends in Asia, to we need to desperately have friends in Asia. And people started getting really self conscious about this.
[56:34]
The way the White Australia Policy was marketed, I mean, the very name of it itself became a subject of great controversy because they didn’t want to offend all of our neighbours in Asia, for fear not only the economic issue of not having trading partners and places to export our goods and materials, but also for this fear of actually the geopolitical breakdown of peace in the Pacific.
So I suppose that’s a general summary of what kicked off of World War II.
Joel Davis: It’s just so ridiculous! I mean, when have White people got offended at these Asian countries for restricting immigration from us? Like when have we complained that the Japanese don’t let White people immigrate there, …
Mathew Grant: Yeah, that’s right, …
Joel Davis: … In substantial numbers.
Mathew Grant: I was just going to say quickly, that it’s a really funny question you ask that, because if you read the Parliamentary debates in 1955, when the Liberal government’s getting rid of the Immigration Restriction Act, one Parliamentarian who is like the Foreign Secretary who travelled all through Asia for some years said:
“All the way going through Asia, the only people who ever brought up any questions or concerns about White Australia were, in fact White journalists that had followed him there to ask the question!”
So yeah, I think it was very overestimated how much the concept of a White Australia offended Asia. I mean, obviously the Japs didn’t like it. But after they got zapped in World War II, I think they were amicable to it. But no one else really cared. It was really the self-conscious, this new generation of post-war, limp wristed kind of rat bags that ran the country, that were really self conscious about it.
Joel Davis: There was some push, some resistance from the Indians back during the imperial days. He put in some complaints about our immigration policy. This is going back to the very beginnings of the 20th century. The British advised them to maybe just withdraw that. I don’t think the Australians are going to let us destroy their immigration policy because the Indians are offended [chuckling] and they didn’t want to provoke us.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen these days I mean, I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but unfortunately, these days it seems as though that is actually literally what is happening. Every time our wog prime minister meets with his Indian counterpart, he’s just opening up the borders more and more for the hordes to pour into the country.
But cycling back to the Second World War and the reaction. Obviously another key reaction to the Second World War was the concept of “Populate or Perish”. And that Australia, not only were we now partners with the United States, more primarily than the British, and that was a bit of a slower transition.
The US didn’t have the same imperial mentality that the English did. Obviously, even though we kind of perceived racial ties, they were trying to de-emphasise their racial identitarianism in the post-war era themselves, because they were trying to become these enlightened leaders of the liberal world order at the time and compete with communism. And they had this approach of combating communism from the Left, trying to prove to the coloured races of the world that in fact, it was the liberal world order that was truly anti-racist, even more so than the Communists.
And also with the legacy of the Second World War, the reconstruction of ideological legitimacy around the defeat of National Socialist Germany and all the implications that that had.
[1:00:03]
And so even though the American people, in many respects, American grassroots nationalism was very much in line with the tendencies in White Australia. The American political elite who we actually had to deal with, they were moving, unfortunately, in this very anti-racialist direction.
And I think that was also a contributing factor to our elite trying to, in its mind, update itself to the new ideals of the new world. The new world in the sense of the postwar international order. But the “populate or perish” element was interesting because that idea was that:
“Well, we’re going to open the border, but just to other Europeans.”
Where before we weren’t so keen on Italians and Greeks and Poles, now we’ll let them in because their countries have all been ruined by the Second World War. A lot of them are looking to get out and have a fresh life. Australia is a land of opportunity, cheap land, massive industrial projects are underway.
And you can see why that was attractive to a lot of them to get out of the blown up Europe that was still gripped by now the Cold War and all the hostility that brought to come out to Australia and make a new life for themselves.
And so we have these massive waves of quote, unquote, “wog migration”. Also at this time, jews start pouring into Australia at a rate that hitherto hadn’t happened. There were some Anglo jewish elements that had come over prior to the Second World War, but they were in very small number and largely quite assimilated as far as jews go, and didn’t seem to cause too much problems.
However, the jews that come over after the Second World War, a lot of them were Communist jews from Eastern Europe and they were bringing with them the ideologies and sensibilities of Central and Eastern European jewry and everything that went along with that at that time in history. So they became very active in the communist movement here, which obviously never really rose to considerable prominence in Australian society.
But nevertheless, it didn’t take them very long to infiltrate our government and start shipping off national secrets to the Soviet Union, which was the reason why we actually had to set up ASIO in the first place. Previously, we had such a high trust society that you could just trust your fellow Anglo Australian brothers to not betray your nation like that. But that started to change and we get this gradual undermining of the pre-war Australian identity.
[1:02:18]
Also, I talked about this a little bit on the show with Blair, this article that I read in The Occidental Observer by Jason Cannon. A three part series called Jews in the Australian Dream, talking about how a lot of these jewish immigrants to Australia, they brought high rise living, they brought cosmopolitan, high density living to Australia that they were accustomed to in European cities where they came from. Previously, Australian society was quite hostile to high density city living.
In fact, not many people really did live close in the actual city centre. You had, like, townhouses for the working class in the surrounding suburbs, but they weren’t high rises. You still had a little backyard, you could have a little family in there. The church was the largest building in the general vicinity.
Now, all of a sudden, these high rise apartments are getting put in the postwar era, about 50% of the high rise apartments that were built in Sydney, and obviously this was mainly a Sydney and Melbourne thing, were built either by jewish architects or by development companies run by jews. And they were built basically in the jewish areas around King’s Cross, in Sydney, in Melbourne, around St Kilda and some of these areas. And that radically transformed Australian society because now you have this cosmopolitanism, you got like the boomer counterculture of the 1960s, the spread out, suburban, largely Christian, White Australian lifestyle was disintegrating.
During the 60s, there was a study done on church attendance, or youth group attendance, actually, in Brisbane. And at the beginning of the 1960s, something like 75% to 80% of young people attended their local church youth group. By the end of the 1960s, that number was down to only 30%.
So you see, youth culture fundamentally transform. The television comes in, the media landscape changes this new American led international order, English speaking culture gets Beamed into the country.
And at the same time, there are all of these threats that you mentioned in the existential position that Australia found itself in. From a geopolitical standpoint, these are the conditions whereby we start seeing the gradual erosion of White Australia.
But obviously, there is still specific actors in the political system who are responsible. So, Matthew, who do you fundamentally blame? Because John Curtin was a staunch advocate of White Australia, he took us through the Second World War. The quotations from the man, the speeches from the man. We know where he stood.
And Robert Menzes*, who got back the Prime Ministership afterwards, he is somewhat to blame, but he also nevertheless understood the importance of maintaining White Australia. Particularly for him, it was the Anglo-Celtic British identity aspect. But the floodgates didn’t exactly just open immediately after the Second World War. It was this very gradual process. And then really only the floodgates opened to foreign migration in the 70s.
[* Robert Menzies Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia (1894-1978) Sir Robert Gordon Menzies was an Australian politician and lawyer who served as the 12th prime minister of Australia from 1939 to 1941 and 1949 to 1966. He held office as the leader of the United Australia Party in his first term, and subsequently as the inaugural leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, which he was responsible for establishing and defining in policy and political outreach. Source: Wikipedia]
So if you could set it up play by play, who are the key actors responsible here?
[1:05:17]
Mathew Grant: Yeah, that’s right. Well, I’ll touch on the jews first because you had a bit to say about them. It’s actually really fascinating!
I’m not sure if you’ve ever read, I mean, as much as I hate the man Churchill, if you’ve ever read Zionism versus Bolshevism, but he touches on a really interesting subject which you’ve kind of touched on. Which is like this idea of the international jew, the rootless jew, who ascribes himself to this kind of Trotskyite, world-wide revolution kind of Marxism.
And then there was the English jew, the naturalised jew in the United Kingdom, who didn’t have that kind of state of mind and in fact was somewhat of a contributor to the country. And Churchill had this view of zionism as being a solution to all these rootless jews to make them feel like they have some possession over some soil and their own ethnic identity and all the rest of it.
Because before World War II, there were a lot of prominent jews in Australia that were absolutely staunch advocates and defenders of the White Australia Policy. So, I mean, number one of this is the great Isaac Isaacs*, who was our first Governor General and a High Court justice, who not only gave lip service to the White Australia Policy, but in court, he actively was involved in cases leading to the deportation of Asiatics from Australia.
[* Sir Isaac Alfred Isaacs, was an Australian lawyer, politician, and judge who served as the ninth Governor-General of Australia, in office from 1931 to 1936. He had previously served on the High Court of Australia from 1906 to 1931, including as Chief Justice from 1930. Isaacs was born in Melbourne and grew up in Yackandandah and Beechworth. Source: Wikipedia]
So there was definitely a heavily assimilated, … I mean, you got General John Monash, who was someone of jewish extraction who fought in the war. He was the first one to kind of revolutionarily use planes, tanks and men in good sequence to save Australian lives.
So it’s really fascinating! You have these guys that were before the war, that were kind of sympathetic to Australia, that were in favour of this concept of a White Australia. Then after the war, there’s this influx of real nasty personalities. There’s an interesting case, Egon Kisch.* He’s an Austrian jew who is in the Communist International. He tried to do a tour of Australia to kind of spur up the Communist Party here and all the rest of it. And when he gets to the immigration official, the immigration official says:
“Okay, cool, no worries. Can you say the Lord’s Prayer in Scottish Gaelic?”
[Image: Egon Kisch in Melbourne in 1934]
[* Egon Erwin Kisch (29 April 1885 – 31 March 1948) was an Austrian and Czechoslovak [jewish] writer and journalist, who wrote in German. He styled himself Der Rasende Reporter (The Racing Reporter) for his countless travels to the far corners of the globe and his equally numerous articles produced in a relatively short time (Hetzjagd durch die Zeit, 1925), Kisch was noted for his development of literary reportage, his opposition to Adolf Hitler, and his Communism. Source: Wikipedia]
And [chuckling] of course, he couldn’t. You could use any European language in the dictation test. It wasn’t actually just five, it was any European language. And Kisch was deported.
But in his stead, it was appealed to the High Court. And after a long series of cases, it was argued that Scottish Gaelic was not, in fact, the European language and he had to be given a more fair test.
[1:08:08]
Anyway, he ended up coming in and giving a couple of speeches. But definitely jews were a bit of a concern to Australia, particularly because of their kind of communist leanings. As Churchill picked up in Zionism versus Bolshevism, most Bolsheviks were of jewish extraction and they were very concerned about Communism coming to Australia.
The Department of Immigration had the same chairman for 15 years, from 1946 onwards. His name was Tasman Hayes, and he was very strict. When Australians were going through these refugee camps in Europe after the war, they had a little tick box on their form of “Aryan non-jewish descent”, and that was part of our immigration policy.
So you did see a little bit of an influx of some jews who managed to slip through the cracks. And a lot of them were quite subversive because they were the East European jews that had no loyalty to Australia or to our, I suppose, British roots.
Joel Davis: By the way, they didn’t just slip through the cracks. There were international jewish networks, many of them based in the United States, which actively funded and supported jews to immigrate to Australia. So that’s another element as well.
Prior to the Second World War, Australia or the Immigration Department would analyze the physiognomy of applicants, and if they looked a little too jewish or they had a jewish sounding name, then they would make sure that they didn’t get through.
And a lot of those people were still working there, obviously, and things like what you just mentioned as well. So they actually needed that kind of institutional support to get in. But somehow a whole massive series of them still managed to get in despite all of that.
Mathew Grant: Not [chuckling] helpful! But yeah, anyway, so that’s one thing. Those Eastern European jews, obviously with this whole post World War II schizophrenia about the “Holocaust” and all the rest of it, I think that the victimhood psychology and their existing Bolshevist kind of tendencies led to them generally being subversive to any kind of nationalist political movement. So there’s the jews.
They’re definitely a part of the whole series of events. But I’m never one person to attribute everything to them. I think there was a lot of other forces at play. And one of the big ones being the commercial interests.
So we had really started scratching the bottom of the barrel. So after World War II we got a good influx of Europeans, but then in the post-war construction, the reconstruction of Europe, migration numbers kind of started to plummet. And so we started going to know Mediterranean migrants and then we kind of soaked all of the willing and suitable ones from those kind of extractions. So you had industries that wanted labour and then you have the perennial kind of corporatists who want to bring in non-unionised, scab labour. So they were definitely advocating behind the scenes in every Chamber of Commerce and all the rest of it. They were all advocates for bringing an end to the White Australia Policy.
Then you have the Democratic Labour Party [DLP]. So they were a so-called anti-communist split off from the Australian Labour Party. So they actually were very staunchly Roman Catholic. They were led by BA Santamaria* and they had an event where they were trying to get a Japanese Bishop to come to Australia, to do a kind of a country mass out near Wagga. And the Bishop was refused entry, basically on the premise of a White Australia.
[Image: B. A. Santamaria (14 August 1915 – 25 February 1998) ]
[* Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, usually known as B. A. Santamaria, or Bob Santamaria, was an Australian Roman Catholic anti-communist political activist and journalist. He was a guiding influence in the founding of the Democratic Labour Party, the party that split from the Labour Party in the 1950s. Source: Wikipedia]
[1:12:10]
So the DLP were the first party after the Communist Party to try and get rid of the White Australia Policy. So they were lobbying on one side, and while at the same time they sucked resources and votes out of the actual Labour Party who were still staunch advocates of a White Australia.
I think the biggest nail in the coffin for White Australia practically was just the final election loss of Arthur Calwell.*
[Image: Calwell as Leader of the Labour Party Opposition]
[* Arthur Augustus Calwell KCSG (28 August 1896 – 8 July 1973) was an Australian politician who served as the leader of the Labour Party from 1960 to 1967. He led the party through three federal elections, losing each one in turn.
In his final year in Parliament, Calwell made several statements regarding non-white immigration to Australia. In March 1972 he publicly endorsed British Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s views on race, later describing the United Kingdom as having experienced a “black tragedy”. In May 1972, in response to comments from customs minister Don Chipp supporting a multi-racial society, Calwell released a statement strongly opposing non-white migration to Australia, stating that he was “appalled” at the thought and was “opposed to the creation of a chocolate-coloured Australia”. In a subsequent interview with The Canberra Times, he stated that non-white migrants would lower community living standards as they “live on the smell of an oily rag and breed like flies”. Source: Wikipedia]
So Calwell went to the national election on the policy of a White Australia. I think the national psyche had kind of changed. The Vietnam War is just kicking off. The DLP is saying:
“We have to fight communism. And to do that we have to be best friends with everyone in Asia, which means we can’t have a racial immigration policy.”
Then you got the new generation, the baby boomers, all these university students who are absolutely obsessed with how exotic foreign people are.
And I think the Colombo Plan, that plan I mentioned earlier, which I think on fundamentals is a pretty good concept, I think a lot of university students, they really had a hard on for some of their visitors from Asia and really just hated this concept of a stagnant kind of British descent, White Australia. They wanted some excitement! They were bored! Post World War II, the most wealthy, the most secure, probably the height of prosperity in our civilisation’s history. So people get bored, they want something exotic.
Joel Davis: They’re all on drugs!
Mathew Grant: Yeah, they’re all on drugs, “how good is the food”, all the standard cultural tropes from them.
So you have all these different prongs coming out. And the only stalwart defenders of White Australia, the Australian Workers Union and Calwell’s leadership of the Labour Party. And Calwell dies in 1973. He’d already handed over the reins to Gough Whitlam*.
It’s interesting, in the Parliamentary debates, when they’re talking about immigration, Gough Whitlam was actually quite staunch on the immigration issue, which you wouldn’t think because he’s kind of credited with bringing an end to White Australia. I think definitely this is in the late 60s when he’s doing this. And he really changed his tone when the 70s rolled around.
[* Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia (1916-2014) Edward Gough Whitlam was the 21st prime minister of Australia, serving from 1972 to 1975. He held office as the leader of the Australian Labour Party, of which he was the longest-serving. Wikipedia]
So there was deception from all sides. But I do genuinely feel like people had lost sympathy for it. Definitely the institutions had. I think the average person was definitely still a supporter of the principles of a White Australia, but they’d also become very self conscious about it. And the way the media spun it was that the White Australia Policy was this:
“Bigoted, hateful policy for no grounds other than we hate them because we breathe!”
And people sucked that up. They actually thought that White Australia was based on “hate” and not based on kind of industrial and social policy considerations.
So by the time the 70s rolled around, 1973, Calwell dies, the Australian Workers Union takes White Australia off their platform and it all goes into freefall from there!
But, yeah, I really don’t think you can really attribute it to any one event. You have lots of these different events playing in unison. I mean, you’re getting pressure from the United States at the same time, they were actively lobbying against the policy, particularly in the later stages of World War II, when they wouldn’t let black sailors off the American ships when they landed in Sydney Harbour. That caused a lot of kerfuffle.
And when Harold Holt was in, the American President, I believe, brought up some concerns about White Australia. So we were just getting nailed from every side about it, really. That’s probably my synopsis on it.
[1:16:11]
Joel Davis: Yeah. And I think just the general spirit of the times, unfortunately, internationally, this tendency towards the kind of greater cosmopolitanism, youth focused culture, the new mass media environment. Yeah, it was like this perfect storm. Obviously, at the same time that it was being undermined in Australia, the borders are starting to get opened across the entire Western world in one way or another through that time period. And that can’t be a coincidence, right? So obviously it would have to be a complex thing.
I do also want to mention (((Walter Max Lippmann*))), who was prominent due a great five part series in The Occidental Observer to direct you to another one which I’ve spoken about many times before, written by Brenton Sanderson, The War on White Australia** a Case Study in the Culture of Critique. Highly recommended! Brilliant, brilliant write up!
[* Walter Max Leopold Lippmann AM MBE (1919–1993) was a jewish and ethnic community leader and advocate of multiculturalism in Australia, Walter was born in Hamburg, Germany and moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1938. He was a member of the Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council during the years 1967–74, and chaired its committee on community relations during the years 1973–75. He was a member of the committee to review the Special Broadcasting Service during the period 1983-84. He helped to establish and became chairman of the Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria during the period 1974-83, and held senior positions in the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils. Source: Wikipedia.
He received, in the 1987 Australia Day Honours, an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for service to the welfare of ethnic communities.]
[** https:// www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/09/06/the-jewish-war-on-white-Australia-colin-tatz-and-the-genocide-charge-part-one /]
He talks in part three about Walter [Max] Lippman, the jewish architect of Australian multiculturalism.
Now there’s another figure, El Grassby*. He was of, I think, Spanish descent, who generally speaking is kind of held up as the father of Australian multiculturalism.
[* Albert Jaime Grassby, AM (12 July 1926 – 23 April 2005) was an Australian politician who served as Minister for Immigration in the Labour Whitlam government. He completed reforms in immigration and human rights, and is often known as the father of Australian “multiculturalism”. He gained notoriety by acting as an agent of influence for the Calabrian criminal network that murdered anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay. Source: Wikipedia]
However, that’s probably for political correct reasons. He’s not jewish, so he’s easier to blame. Obviously he’s still just as responsible.
Mathew Grant: And Spanish too are to blame!
Joel Davis: [chuckling] So many people are to blame. But Lippman, I think, is important to note. I mean, he was a German jewish refugee who came just before the Second World War broke out, actually. Prominent member of the jewish community down in Melbourne. Active in their organisations and so on. And elevated through those networks, ultimately into being appointed during the Whitlam government in the early seventies to run the immigration department. With him in, all of the racists that were in the Immigration Department were flushed out! Because again, as we were saying, it was bureaucratically enforced. It wasn’t hard law so much as the law empowered the bureaucracy to exercise discretion, generally speaking.
[118:13]
And so it was really dependent upon the quality of individuals and the culture of the Immigration Department more so than anything else. And he wrote articles around the same time talking about how:
“A multicultural society is necessary for the jews to feel comfortable in the country because otherwise they’re going to be marginalised by the domination of Anglo Saxon cultural superiority.”
Yeah, and obviously you got the post “Holocaust” psychosis going on at the same time. This is also important to take into consideration and as the emergence of this pluralist ideology, the figures behind it.
We should have mentioned this before, perhaps when we’re talking about World War I and World War II, but there was a consciousness that they were fighting for White Australia. Everything was justified in those terms. And you look at what we have today of documents of some of the war propaganda and so on, and it was incredibly racial the way that it was portrayed to the Australian people to get people to go and fight those wars and to moralise the soldiers. And the bodies that represented the soldiers were staunch in their advocacy. The RSL, the Return Services League, still had senior representatives speaking in defense of the White Australia Policy. Still in the 80s! I talked about this a little bit in The Joel and Blair Show that we did back on Anzac Day, for obvious reasons.
But yeah, obviously their political influence was more prominent immediately after the Second World War, but it started to decline and the popularity of Australian veterans hit an all time low with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, obviously. So their political capital was at an all time low at the absolute worst possible time., …
Mathew Grant: It’s interesting, sorry. It’s interesting with Vietnam as well, because when Vietnam first kicked off, it was really popular. And Calwell and the Labour Party, who supported a White Australia, were dead against going into Vietnam. And that’s considered one of the big reasons why they lost that election, which led to Caldwell having to abdicate to Gough Whitlam. So it’s another interesting play in it.
Like, obviously Vietnam became quite unpopular later, but it was Calwell’s refusal to send Australian troops into Vietnam which was a big contributor to them losing, which then kind of shook up the Labour Party after they lost a couple of elections back to back. It really made Calwell’s policies seem like outdated, unpopular. White Australia being part of the unpopular thing that needs to be thrown into the dust bin.
But yeah, go on. Sorry.
Joel Davis: That’s a good interjection because it’s an important context because this is the Cold War period. Right?
So the accusations to the Left that they aren’t sufficiently anti-communist were obviously very potent at that time, and particularly with the DLP thing that you described and them breaking away to kind of get a picture of the political climate at the time. Also in the 70s, when we were starting to really bring in non-White migrants, really for the first time in large quantities, one of the key selling points and one of the main demographics was the Vietnamese, that:
“We wrecked their country, we owe it to them!”
And so on.
[1:21:28]
Mathew Grant: A lot of the South Vietnamese refugees were very anti-communist, which was seen as another playing card in their deck. That’s why a lot of people supported, like a lot of DLP types, the anti-Communists. They’re so anti-communist, they’ve become colour-blind and they’ll take in any anti-communist in the world.
Joel Davis: Yeah, I mean, you still have that today, right? With Conservatives talking about “based minorities”. You see that quite often with people like Mark Latham and they’re like:
“Oh, epic! And based brown people hate homosexuals just as much as we do. That’s so great!”
Yes, we’re getting to the kind of tragic component of the story. And I guess really White Australia, it came into being as we described in the 19th century, as a political concept through struggle. And it was almost like at the end of World War II, we had so much prosperity. I mean, Australian prosperity was at a scale that was really only matched by the United States.
Even to this day, despite all the damage that’s been done to our economy, our GDP per capita is higher than pretty much any European country, I think, except like Switzerland and Luxembourg and those kinds of countries. And it’s very close to the American levels. Plus we have a European style Welfare State on top of that, unlike the Americans.
So incredible prosperity in Australia. And that’s after so much damage has been done. Back in the mean it was incredible! We truly lived in, from an economic standpoint, a utopia. The boomers had it good! And much like the cosmopolitan Brits in London that had no concept of the impact of this importation of foreign races, non-White races into the country, they also, I think, lacked this perception. And it’s a lack of perception that you see to this day in the White upper middle class who live in some of the gentrified intercity areas and the only non-Whites they have to deal with are high IQ, successful non-Whites who don’t seem so bad.
Meanwhile, the White working class out in places like Western Sydney have to deal with the actual reality.
[1:23:36]
But yeah, in the 80s you do see a little bit of pushback starting to come online, some prominent academic defenders of White Australia emerge. You see a figure like John Howard who was in opposition at the time making some pretty charged comments on the subject of immigration. Conservatives getting more muscular in their opposition.
So the Labour Party, which under Paul Keating, you know, really pushed into the:
“Australia has to move into being a part of Asia.”
And the Asianification of Australia and really doubling down on multiculturalism.
And with the end of the Cold War, “end of history”, global liberal internationalist, the ideology that we’re accustomed to now really came through with Keating. And in response to that you get the One Nation Party. So even though the One Nation Party didn’t advocate for a return to the White Australia Policy, they were obviously representative of that tendency. An echo of those tendencies meant much of the rhetoric from Pauline Hanson* when she first emerged onto the scene as a national political figure. There were echoes of Labour Party rhetoric from the 60s and earlier. People like Ben Chifley and so on, I think, who she directly quoted in her maiden speech. And I think her speech writers were guys that, I think the main speech writer – I can’t remember his name, unfortunately you might know who he was – wrote that “Swamped by Asians” speech** that she gave, famous.
[* Pauline Lee Hanson (née Seccombe, formerly Zagorski; born 27 May 1954) is an Australian politician who is the founder and leader of One Nation, a Right-wing populist political party. Hanson has represented Queensland in the Australian Senate since the 2016 Federal Election.]
[** MP Pauline Hanson called for an end to multiculturalism, foreign aid and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in her maiden address to Parliament (1996)
‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians,’ she said.
‘They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.’]
Mathew Grant: I remember his face, but not the name!
Joel Davis: I think he used to work for Graeme Campbell* who set up the Australia First Party after leaving the Labour Party as one of these old racist Labourites that are no longer welcome.
[* Graeme Campbell (born 13 August 1939) is an Australian “far-Right” politician. Campbell represented the seat of Kalgoorlie in the Australian House of Representatives from 1980 to 1998 as a member of the Australian Labour Party. Campbell later founded the nationalist Australia First Party, before joining Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Source: Wikipedia]
Mathew Grant: Yeah, there was a few of them, [chuckling] yeah.
Joel Davis: And so One Nation came on board and it was a bit of a flash in the pan. It was interesting to get your reflections on the 90s and White populism coming back into vogue.
Mathew Grant: Yeah, there’s a really bit of interesting history there. And a reasonable amount of it is captured in Dr. Jim Salem’s PhD thesis which is like a contemporary study of the far-Right in Australia.
But you had all sorts of groups, you had Australians against further immigration and that was a political party that got stacks of votes! One Nation ended up sucking most of their votes up. And then the Liberal Party started playing the game to win their votes back. And that was part of Howard’s crusade to try and bring votes back. But you did still have some of these old hangout kind of nationalists in the Labour Party.
So, you mentioned Graeme Campbell. Another one was John Fischer. He was in the Western Australian Parliament and he said:
“You cannot have a nation where the only shared value is the fact that there are no shared beliefs! The importance of a clear definition is now more urgent. And due to the disastrous federal policies of multiculturalism imposed on us by major political parties since the Whitlam era, multiculturalism is the negation and the rejection of a shared national identity.”
So you do get some dudes in the back ranks, which is still kind of causing a bit of a fuss. And there is some voting outbursts like Australians against further immigration. One Nation. Then you get some of the more exotic, like, National Socialist Democratic Australian Party. There’s all these weird kind of dudes that are kind of role playing as 1930s Germans, but in Australia.
[1:27:22]
So there’s a few of those little parties floating around. But overall it does seem to become like the majority of Australians, you know, Bob Hawke* and Paul Keating**, these trendy Labour prime ministers were fully on board with Asianisation. And so I think a lot of the country went with them. Because particularly Bob Hawke was probably our most loved prime minister for a very long time, just because he could shoot a pint of beer real quick and created Medicare.
[* Robert James Lee Hawke AC GCL (9 December 1929 – 16 May 2019) was an Australian politician and trade Unionist who served as the 23rd prime minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991. He held office as the leader of the Australian Labour Party (ALP), having previously served as the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1969 to 1980 and president of the Labour Party national executive from 1973 to 1978.
During the period of 1973 to 1979, Hawke acted as an informant for the United States government. According to Coventry, Hawke as concurrent leader of the ACTU and ALP informed the US of details surrounding labour disputes, especially those relating to American companies and individuals, such as union disputes with Ford Motor Company and the black ban of Frank Sinatra. Source: Wikipedia]
[** Paul John Keating (born 18 January 1944) is an Australian former politician who served as the 24th prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996, holding office as the leader of the Australian Labour Party (ALP). He previously served as the treasurer of Australia under Prime Minister Bob Hawke from 1983 to 1991 and as the seventh deputy prime minister of Australia from 1990 to 1991. Source: Wikipedia.
[Image: Australian jewish billionaire Anthony Pratt has Keating on his list of “consultant” payments to him of $25,000 a month and to Tony Abbott of $8000 a month after his hiring in June 2019. Source: https:// www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/being-rich-is-my-superpower-tapes-reveal-pratt-is-pursuit-of-the-powerful-20231017-p5ecwv.html]
So you had the general population kind of being raised with like a negative reflection on their recent history. So you already have the media and the education game in full force. So the loyalty to the concepts of a wide Australia really become lost.
And then the typical conservative just talking about immigration generally and civic nationalism starts to become more of a force to play in the 90s.
But yeah, it goes on and it just quietly dies in the background. I think a lot of nationalism, a lot of groups and causes were kind of discredited with their own autism.
So it’s a bit of a shame.
Joel Davis: Yeah, I mean, I was reading about the 90s recently and there was a study that was done because I was reading about the formation of the Australian property lobby in the 90s, which they really got organised in response to the sudden emergence of Pauline Hanson.
And people who are younger and don’t really know about that time, Hansen was a nobody that burst onto the scene in 1996 and just simply because she was just some random fish and chip shop lady that was preselected for the Liberals in a seat they didn’t expect to win, who came out and started talking about the problems with Aboriginals and with immigrants and the media went ballistic against her. The Liberal Party removed their endorsement. She ran as an independent and won! The people were behind her.
And then all of a sudden, this One Nation Party infrastructure was just kind of smashed together through different elements very quickly and rapidly. And because it was kind of put together by grifters and inexperienced political figures, including Hansen herself, it didn’t have any staying power, it was a total disaster and it fell apart as quickly as it was put together.
[1:30:00]
But in the Queensland election, I believe in 96 or 98, they did get like a quarter of the vote! Which is insane for some brand new political party, obviously. So it showed the appetite in the electorate. There was a study done, I think, in 1994 on immigration and what they found was that 71% of Australians wanted radical reductions to immigration.
So immigration was wildly unpopular! And no one was giving the people a voice. And then even this awkward, politically inexperienced, gaff machine woman comes on the scene and just makes a few noises in the right direction and becomes a political force that shakes the foundations of Australian politics for the subsequent decade.
So that shows how the sentiments in the general Australian population were still relatively racially conscious, despite everything even in the 90s. I think we should look at that, its tragic in many respects at how much of a missed opportunity it was and how poorly handled it was and how we’ve inherited basically nothing, almost from the people who were involved back then.
But it should also be a cause for some optimism because of how quickly it was able to kind of shoot up in political relevance, that if it could be replicated with better organisation, that who knows what could happen.
But in those days, Australia was still over 90% White. And even the Australia that I grew up in, I was born in 1995. When I was a young child in the 2000s in the areas in where I grew up and lived and so on, pretty much everyone was White. It was kind of strange to see a non-White person, even though I lived in suburban Melbourne and suburban Sydney. And then gradually the floodgates opened and, … There’s about 20 million White people in Australia today.
But there’s about 7 million non-Whites in Australia, more or less. And thankfully, I think less than 2 million of them actually have citizenship.
But obviously now we’ve got Albanese opening the floodgates into the country at unprecedented levels. We’ve got immigration rates now that are three times the national record on a yearly basis in this kind of post Covid era. Anti-immigration politics is coming back to the fore and a new kind of identitarianism is becoming internationally popular because the reality that there is this global replacement of the White race across the entire Western world is dawning on everyone! Whether you want to take whatever kind of reaction you want to take to it it’s gotten past the stage where people could just ignore it. It’s now becoming just a reality of life that everyone has to accept and now we have to make the debate is around the value judgements and the response.
And today, though, traditionally White Australia was very much focused on economic issues. And there are some economic issues that are quite egregious, which are caused by immigration today. The speed in which they’re bringing people in is obviously causing a housing crisis in Australia. Now we’re recording this 15 July 2023. Rents are flying up at record levels in Sydney and Melbourne. There’s wage stagnation even though we’re having an inflation crisis and it’s an economic mess from the Covid recovery mixed with mass immigration.
[1:33:37]
There’s something like a million foreign students in Australia right now. So many Indians pouring in through student visas, taking all of these low skilled jobs. We got the Chinese buying up neighbourhoods, we got Indians buying up neighbourhoods, White people moving into, there’s less and less options within the cities for young White families. Birth rates are at an all time low. We’re in a very bad position. And it’s become, as I said at the beginning, in the minds of the Australian political elite and media establishment you’re an “extremist” if you’re loyal to this idea of White Australia, if you have a racial identitarian worldview when it comes to politics.
So under this context, how much of what we’ve discussed in Australian history do you think we can draw upon? Because I think there is a certain kind of post class, post material element to identitarian politics today where even despite all of these economic machinations, the average Australian is still pretty well off. It’s more of an existential threat, a cultural threat, a way of life threat. It is an economic issue as well, but I don’t think that’s enough of a motivating factor.
And I think that the story that we just told of describing how White Australia was preserved despite all of its opposition for the first half of this country’s existence and then how it was destroyed, was that in the first half of this country’s existence it was explicitly racial identitarian. We you mentioned some quotes. I mentioned some quotes, but every political leader at that time was a White nationalist! And they did not pull any punches. They were explicit.
And then we get the phase in the 50s, 60s, 70s, where it becomes you have to talk around the issue and you can’t speak about it directly. We talked about Pauline Hanson. That’s the ultimate politics of talking around the issue where:
“No, I’m not racist! And it’s no immigration without assimilation. And the problem is that they’re not assimilating!”
But now the One Nation Party is running Indians in elections in New South Wales to try and win the Indian vote because according to Mark Latham, the leader of the One Nation Party in New South Wales, Indians have family values and nationalism. And these are One Nation values, apparently. So they’ve completely acquiesced.
But the point is that the civic nationalism, the economic nationalism wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough ultimately to preserve White Australia. And I’ve also talked a bit recently about how if you look at the voter demographics, non-English speaking immigrants vote for the Left at like a 20% higher rate voting for the Labour Party than either English speaking immigrants to Australia or Australian born who vote basically the same way if you control for average income.
So the Right-wing has totally abandoned, … You talked about Howard and you’re probably seeing a similar thing with Dutton. Well, they’ll dog whistle certain anti-immigration sentiments while they’re in opposition to maintain political legitimacy. But when they get in they’re beholden to the same big business interest that they always have been, and they’re going to keep pouring the immigrants in.
So how do we learn from our history? What can we take into 2023 and beyond? How can we bring back White Identity Politics to Australia in light of all of this?
[1:37:28]
Mathew Grant: Yeah, well, good question. I think the first thing worth noting is that during the days of Bob Hawke and Keating in the we did have all these kind of nationalist sympathies getting around and different groups.
And although we haven’t been handed much of an inheritance other than some good ideological groundwork which has been done by a lot of kind of Nativist nationalists in the last 30 years. What we have been inheriting from them, to those that are willing to listen and those willing to read and understand is a lot of lessons learnt about practical organisational skills and ideological issues.
So there has been some things handed to us. Because nationalists really had to restart after the Labour Party dropped White Australia. A whole new cadre of completely fresh people had to reinvent the wheel and create a political machine. I mean, Australia’s modern context is not too far off from the historical context. I mean, in the 1890s in Australia, there was also a housing crisis and there was cause for the progressive land tax and there was arguments about immigration affecting housing affordability and labour costs and all the things that Philip Lowe* was talking about the other day.
[* Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe has warned that not enough homes are being built to house an influx of migrants, predicting that rents will continue to rise in a further hit to household budgets. Source: https:// www.afr.com/policy/economy/philip-lowe-is-housing-market-warning-20230405-p5cya0]
I think one of the big things, if we take the economics out of this situation, we forget the fact that 7/11 was paying Indians $0.75 an hour a couple of years ago, according to some news reports.
The issue we have to really look at now from a know, cultural, social point of view is this concept of social capital and diversity. So there is a lot of academic literature that’s coming out now.
I mean, the real Magna Carta in this space is Robert Putnam’s work in Diversity and Community in the 21st Century, which is a 2007 academic study into ethnic diversity and how it was found in the United States ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, all the races kind of hunker down. So it lowers a sense of trust. It lowers the sense of common identity, belonging. It reduces, I suppose, the moral and social desire for people to commit acts of charity and voluntarism. This kind of point of our civilisation where people go and do good in the private space, they create mutual associations and charities, and neighbours take care of each other, and you have street barbecues and all the rest of it. You have a common sense of belonging, identity, purpose and destiny. These things are all considered “social capital”.
[1:40:15]
And a lot of the literature now is pointing to the fact that the greater there is diversity amongst ethnicities, the lower there is social capital, the less trust there is so from the point of view, it’s actually to no one’s benefit except international finance, who benefits from cheap labour, or perhaps to the benefit of Trotskyites who have an interest in creating social upheaval so they can try and win themselves political power. It’s of no one’s interest, not even the migrants interest, to have this level of diversity. Ethnic diversity is an absolute detriment to civil society and the creation of meaningful community, especially national community.
I mean, even Charles Pearson, in his National Life and Character in 1893, he comments on the fact that government and democracy becomes quite impossible when you have such divergent populations that constitute the voter base. When you have different ethnic and cultural groups that are all pulling in different directions, things become more and more radical. Similar to how it is in India. In India, you have very diverse ethnic and cultural and religious groups that are all pulling in different directions. And those directions, they manifest in the Parliament of India. But often it spills out onto the streets, into great mass mob violence. And there’s great upheaval in any instance where you have a democracy that’s racially and ethnically diverse.
So I think that’s the next thing we have to tap in. We learn all these things from the past. We learn the economic issues, but we’re also learning the social issues.
And now there’s a great body of academic work looking at this issue of social capital and diversity. And we need to make a point of that and we need to make a solid, stalwart argument for a White Australia that is a European descent country. How Henry Parks was talking about Asiatics having different institutions. If we go back to why is it important to be White? It’s important to be White because we have a valued heritage. We look at our English common law and we look at our Parliamentarian system. We look at basic liberties of the man. I hate to use the word “liberalism” because it’s obviously morphed into a great, more negative and destructive force in civilisation.
But the forces at play in civilisation from Rome up until probably 150 years ago, in my point of view, are positive things and those things are going to be adhered to by people of European extraction because they can always look back and say:
“Hey! My ancestors spilt blood for this cause!”
They spilt blood for the principles of our civilisation. Where people from Asia or Africa don’t have that same affinity. Their ancestors didn’t fight for Magna Carta. They didn’t fight for the Act of Settlement. They were just in know, they were living in huts and having a good time!
So it’s just different cultures, different ethnic groups and races have different things they value based on their heritage. And so therefore you’ll never be able to have that homogeneity and Common Purpose and identity.
[1:43:41]
Joel Davis: What we’re finding out from race realism as well, which they wouldn’t have known, didn’t have genetic modeling and things like this back in the formation of the White Australia Policy, is that it’s not just about heritage. What you said is obviously incredibly important!
But also what we find from race realism is that the largest genetic differences, the largest biological differences between the races have to do with neurophysiology. Not skin colour or bone structure or these kinds of things, but neurophysiology. In other words, in the aspects of our biological makeup which have the most influence over attitudes, behaviours, tendencies and so on.
So you can see how this would manifest in cultural and political differences, because it means we fundamentally just hardwired with different mentalities.
And so the preservation of our way of life is really there is a kind of conscious aspect to our heritage but also an unconscious organic aspect to our heritage which just comes through us in an involuntary way. It’s just part of who we are, that only fellow people of European descent can share with us. It’s just simply impossible for us to share that with people of other races and vice versa.
And that really does account for why we have such radically different civilisations. I mean, you look to the Japanese, for example, and I have a very impressive country, a very impressive civilisation. They were our ancient enemy. But now I’m quite happy actually to be allied with the Japanese. I find them to be a respectable people.
And now, other than the United States, they are probably our next best ally, frankly. And you could see in their culture, it’s a very developed, very impressive culture, but it’s radically different. We can appreciate things about them and they can appreciate things about us.
But ultimately you can only have a Japan if it’s Japanese people.
And I think everyone understands that, thankfully, I think including most Japanese people still. And it’s the same for us. And if we want our children to have a way of life that is in any way analogous to what we were accustomed to when we were being raised, where my parents never had to sit me down, they probably didn’t have the ideological resources to sit me down and explain to me my heritage as Anglo Saxon or as an Australian. It just happened naturally. It was just growing up, I participated in that they’re just normal Australian people. We have a normal Australian culture and I just organically learnt about it, internalised it and so on.
[1:46:24]
No one told me you have to like cricket. I just did. No one told me it’s really nice to have a barbecue on a Saturday night. I just like doing that, you know what I mean? It’s just little things like that which might not seem like much, but they accumulate when you really add them all up together. And that is just part of who we are.
And it’s something which really dawned on me. Even traveling in Britain for some time in other parts of Europe and coming back to Australia, even just the differences between us and them, even though the racial stock is so similar, the people there in Denmark or in England, they look just like Australians pretty much. But even those differences are large. Then you multiply that with racial differences and it’s just incredible!
I think that’s really the basis of the new politics is this more advanced and developed understanding of racial and cultural difference and its importance. Because obviously with advances in air travel and other kinds of transport technology and economic development, mass immigration is so much easier than it ever was before.
And so we’re kind of running this experiment, this multiracial experiment in a radically new way with this anti-racist ideology kind of bolted onto it to kind of force integration.
And to me, it’s an issue that ultimately transcends class differences. Then, even though it is easy for the White upper class, as we mentioned before, to escape some of the consequences, they can’t escape all of them. And the longer that it goes on, the harder and harder it is going to be for these people to escape them.
So I guess the final thought would be to get from you before we close this up, Matthew, would be, fundamentally, when it comes to the White Australia Policy, if you had to kind of boil it down into a nutshell, its significance, because this should be our birthright. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really handed to us, but this should be our birthright. This is what our ancestors, my ancestors have been in Australia for over 200 years. I think from talking to you, it’s similar time frame, maybe even longer. Our ancestors were actually part of this building White Australia.
So this was supposed to be our birthright that’s being stripped away. That’s why I wanted to make this, because I really wanted there to be a resource and hopefully more resources can get developed to really impress upon this history to our people.
But to you, what is the essential inheritance if you had to kind of sum it up? What’s most inspirational to you about the history of the White Australia Policy and the formation of this once great nation?
Mathew Grant: From my point of view.
The most important thing to me is this creation of a national sense of community. People sharing a common sense of identity, belonging, purpose, where people shared the same worldview and outlook on life. I think it gets back to this idea of a homogeneous society being the ultimate form of a society. I think there’s nothing wrong with being friends with your neighbours and having good relationships with all sorts of cultures and ethnic groups around the world.
[1:49:36]
But I think your home and the place where you dwell, you should be principally in relations with people of your own stock. And that creates the greatest sense of community and belonging and creates the most positive attributes of our culture and human condition. People are more inclined to do acts of good work and charity and all the rest of it. But it is just essential to everything, our standard of living as decent, civilised people, and not rats working for a bowl of rice a day. That’s really important too. But the big thing to me is just the social cohesion, culture and community. That’s the biggest draw card to me.
Before we finish, I’d like to just read one final quote from Billy Hughes, our 7th Prime Minister of Australia, in the Parliamentary debates on the 5 July 1949. He said:
“I want to make it clear to the honourable members and to the people of this country that the White Australia Policy is not a mere banner waved by politicians and waved to inflame party passions. It is a living thing. White Australia is Australia! And everything that is inherent in the White Australia Policy is vital to the very existence of Australia itself.”
And that truly is on all levels the racial, cultural, White Australia really is Australia and everything that we hold dear to our heritage is inextricably linked to the fact that this was a European descent country.
Joel Davis: Yeah, thank you Matthew, this was great! And you can find the website for Matthew’s organisation, the Australian Natives Association. Ausnatives.org, AUSnatives.org. I’ll put link in the description. Also I’ll put links to your Telegram and your Twitter and so on so people can go and find your social media presence. Yeah, if you’re interested in finding out about the organisation, we did a podcast, I think maybe six months ago or so, which is also on this channel talking about your organisation and the philosophy of the organisation. So if you haven’t watched that, you can go check that out.
But yeah, pleasure to have you on, as always and hopefully we can do another collabouration soon on another subject. I thought this was really good.
Mathew Grant: Yeah, great! No, it was good.
Joel Davis: The audience will love it. So thanks everyone for listening.
And by the way, if you’re watching this, you might not know that I have a second, I did mention earlier, the show that I do with Blair. I have a second YouTube channel, The Joel and Blair Show YouTube channel. You can find@youtube.com slash at Joel and Blair. And there Blair Cottrell and I every Thursday night, 08:00 p.m., we talk about Australian political news, basically for the previous week and do our kind of analysis. So check that out.
There isn’t too many weekly shows on Australian politics that are worth listening to. I’d like to think that the one that we do is one of the few that actually is so go and subscribe to that if you haven’t already. And thanks for listening.
[1:52:39]
END
============================================
Youtube Comments
(Comments as of 7/29/2023 = 28)
@zoomerboomer3109
1 day ago
Exellent stream, can be hard to find good historical discussions about Aus and NZ history. Bloody insufferable being forced to read books from the likes of James Belich.
13
@maxtrainor8401
1 day ago
Great work, can you make one on an American version of white policy?
21
1 reply
@windhoek1675
1 day ago (edited)
If you would like a book on this subject for your own reading, I’d recommend re-forging America by Lothrop Stoddard.
5
@peroercegovac1973
1 day ago
Fantastic stream. At the highest level of historicism. Well done.
6
@SteveLogan-lt8zi
1 day ago
Excellent discussion. Hopefully it is an ongoing thing.
13
@Vingul
1 day ago
Extremely interesting, great to hear so many quotations by men of the era, very relatable and relevant to us (though I’m not Australian myself).
Joel, or Matthew, what book would you recommend to understand this era and the policy? If you were to recommend only one, I guess — either an original work from the time or a later overview.
19
4 replies
@letztersohndesabendlandes7471
1 day ago
Commenting so that I get notified if anyone responds to this – also interested in going a bit deeper on nationalist Australian history.
6
@deanalessi9583
1 day ago
Australia’s awakening, thirty years in the life of an Australian agitator by William Guthrie Spence
4
@Vingul
1 day ago
@deanalessi9583 Thanks!
@jackmatthews939
23 hours ago (edited)
The Making of White Australia – P.Griffiths – Australian National University 2006
The Making of White Australia – D.Gibb – Victorian Historical Association 1975
The Administration of the White Australia Policy – A.C.Palfreeman – Melbourne University Press 1967
History of the White Australia Policy to 1920 – Myra Willard – Melbourne University Press 1978
“Be Just & Fear Not” – A.A Calwell – Wilk & Company 1972
This is probably the best book to explain what happened in Australia post WW2 & is written by a former major politician/minister covering until the 1960’s.
6
@LogosVeritas-di1yp
20 hours ago
Great work guys. Matthew grant is so very knowledgable on this topic. thanks for putting this together Joel
2
@domsanchez148
1 day ago
Great work as usual.
7
@blackriders3509
1 day ago
Well done
13
@henrylawson938
1 day ago
Let’s have a 20 yr moratorium on immigration and close down immigration, just leaving passport control and border protection.
6
2 replies
@gch8810
1 day ago
50 years would be better.
4
@EliteBuildingCompany
1 day ago
Good stream, cheers.
7
@jeffreysebranek9697
1 day ago
Hi joel. Love your shows buddy
1
@leonieblah8806
1 day ago
great video
4
@BasedYeeter42
16 hours ago
Interesting stuff, curious to know where the Lebanese would fit into this model, considering our tendency to pass off as white in comparison to our neighbors
1
1 reply
@LuciusAugustusRomanusInvictus
15 hours ago
Anecdotally it seems Christian and Muslim lebos are almost different populations but it would be stretching the definition of white to include lebos in general
@audhumbla6927
1 day ago
❤
4
@user-jp4ci5ny3v
1 day ago
Let’s gooooooo
5
==========================
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Version History
Version 5:
Version 4: Thu, May 30, 2024 — Transcript complete. Added Content list.
Version 3: Wed, May 29, 2024 — 90/113 mins of transcript complete. Added images.
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Version 1: Mon, May 27, 2024 — Published post. 60/113 mins of transcript complete. Includes Youtube comments (28).
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