White Australia policy
The term White Australia policy was used to encapsulate a set of historical policies that aimed to exclude people of non-European origin Asians and Pacific Islanders from immigrating to Australia. Governments progressively dismantled such policies between 1949 and 1973. Competition in the gold fields between British and Chinese miners, labour-union opposition to the importation of Pacific Islanders into the sugar plantations of Queensland, reinforced demands to eliminate or minimize low-wage immigration from Asia and the Pacific Islands. From the 1850s colonial governments imposed restrictions on family members joining Chinese miners in Australia; the colonial authorities levied a special tax on Chinese immigrants that other immigrants were exempted from. Towards the end of the 19th century labour unions pushed to stop Chinese immigrants working in the furniture and market-garden industries. Australian furniture had to be labelled "Made with Chinese Labour". Soon after Australia became a federation in January 1901, the federal government of Edmund Barton passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, drafted by the man who would become Australia's second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin.
The passage of this bill marked the commencement of the White Australia Policy as Australian federal government policy. Subsequent acts further strengthened the policy up to the start of the Second World War; these policies gave British migrants preference over all others through the first four decades of the 20th century. During the Second World War, Prime Minister John Curtin reinforced the policy, saying "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."Successive governments dismantled the policy in stages after the conclusion of the Second World War of 1939-1945, with the encouragement of first non-British, non-white immigration, allowing for a large multi-ethnic post-war program of immigration. The Menzies and Holt Governments dismantled the policies between 1949 and 1966, the Whitlam Government passed laws to ensure that race would be disregarded as a component for immigration to Australia in 1973.
In 1975 the Whitlam Government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, which made racially-based selection criteria unlawful. In the decades since, Australia has maintained large-scale multi-ethnic immigration; as of 2018, Australia's migration program allows people from any country to apply to migrate to Australia, regardless of their nationality, culture, religion, or language, provided that they meet the criteria set out in law. The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 led to an influx of immigrants from all around the world; the colony of New South Wales had a population of just 200,000 in 1851, but the huge influx of settlers spurred by the gold rushes transformed the Australian colonies economically and demographically. Over the next 20 years, 40,000 Chinese men and over 9,000 women immigrated to the goldfields seeking prosperity. Gold brought great wealth but new social tensions. Multi-ethnic migrants came to New South Wales in large numbers for the first time. Competition on the goldfields resentment among white miners towards the successes of Chinese miners, led to tensions between groups and a series of significant protests and riots, including the Buckland Riot in 1857 and the Lambing Flat Riots between 1860 and 1861.
Governor Hotham, on 16 November 1854, appointed a Royal Commission on Victorian goldfields problems and grievances. This led to restrictions being placed on Chinese immigration and residency taxes levied from Chinese residents in Victoria from 1855 with New South Wales following suit in 1861; these restrictions remained in force until the early 1870s. Reference does not support the argument of this paragraph Melbourne Trades Hall was opened in 1859 with Trades and Labour Councils and Trades Halls opening in all cities and most regional towns in the following forty years. During the 1880s Trade unions developed among shearers and stevedores, but soon spread to cover all blue-collar jobs. Shortages of labour led to high wages for a prosperous skilled working class, whose unions demanded and got an eight-hour day and other benefits unheard of in Europe. Australia gained a reputation as "the working man's paradise." Some employers tried to undercut the unions by importing Chinese labour. This produced a reaction which led to all the colonies restricting Chinese and other Asian immigration.
This was the foundation of the White Australia Policy. The "Australian compact", based around centralised industrial arbitration, a degree of government assistance for primary industries, White Australia, was to continue for many years before dissolving in the second half of the 20th century; the growth of the sugar industry in Queensland in the 1870s led to searching for labourers prepared to work in a tropical environment. During this time, thousands of "Kanakas" were brought into Australia as indentured workers; this and related practices of bringing in non-white labour to be cheaply employed was termed "blackbirding" and refers to the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations the sugar cane plantations of Queensland and Fiji. In the 1870s and 1880s, the trade union movement began a series of protests against foreign labour, their arguments were that Asians and Chinese took jobs away from white men, worked for "substandard" wages, lowered working conditions and refused unionisation.
Objections to these arguments came from wealthy
Australia
Australia the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area; the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea and East Timor to the north. The population of 25 million is urbanised and concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, its largest city is Sydney; the country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians for about 60,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, it is documented. After the European exploration of the continent by Dutch explorers in 1606, who named it New Holland, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day; the population grew in subsequent decades, by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established.
On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories. Being the oldest and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils, Australia has a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres. A megadiverse country, its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east and mountain ranges in the south-east. A gold rush began in Australia in the early 1850s, its population density, 2.8 inhabitants per square kilometre, remains among the lowest in the world. Australia generates its income from various sources including mining-related exports, telecommunications and manufacturing. Indigenous Australian rock art is the oldest and richest in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years and spread across hundreds of thousands of sites. Australia is a developed country, with the world's 14th-largest economy.
It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth-highest per capita income. It is a regional power, has the world's 13th-highest military expenditure. Australia has the world's ninth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 26% of the population. Having the third-highest human development index and the eighth-highest ranked democracy globally, the country ranks in quality of life, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights, with all its major cities faring well in global comparative livability surveys. Australia is a member of the United Nations, G20, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Pacific Islands Forum and the ASEAN Plus Six mechanism; the name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis, a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times. When Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as "New Holland", a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts; the name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth". The first time that Australia appears to have been used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known by that name; the first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office. Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under". Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", "the Wide Brown Land".
The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country". Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun around 65,000 to 70,000 years ago, with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia; these first inhabitants were the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continual civilisations on earth. At the time of first European contact, most Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers with complex economies and societies. Recent archaeological finds suggest. Indigenous Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime; the Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited s
Second Deakin Ministry
The Second Deakin Ministry was the 5th ministry of the Government of Australia. It was led by Alfred Deakin; the First Deakin Ministry succeeded the Reid Ministry, which dissolved on 5 July 1905 following the resignation of George Reid after the Protectionists withdrew their support and gained support from the Labour Party. The ministry was replaced by the Third Deakin Ministry on 24 January 1907 following the 1906 federal election
George Reid
Sir George Houston Reid was an Australian politician who led the Reid Government as the fourth Prime Minister of Australia from 1904 to 1905, having been Premier of New South Wales from 1894 to 1899. He led the Free Trade Party from 1891 to 1908. Reid was born in Johnstone, Scotland, he and his family immigrated to Australia. They settled in Melbourne, but moved to Sydney when Reid was 13, at which point he left school and began working as a clerk, he joined the New South Wales civil service, rose through the ranks to become secretary of the Attorney-General's Department. Reid was something of a public intellectual, publishing several works in defence of liberalism and free trade, he began studying law in 1876 and was admitted to the bar in 1879. In 1880, he resigned from the civil service to run for parliament, winning election to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly. From 1883 to 1884, Reid served as Minister for Public Instruction in the government of Alexander Stuart, he joined the Free Trade Party of Henry Parkes in 1887, but refused to serve in Parkes' governments due to personal enmity.
When Parkes resigned as party leader in 1891, Reid was elected in his place. He remained in office for just over five years. Despite never winning majority government, Reid was able to pass a number of domestic reforms concerning the civil service and public finances, he was an advocate of federation and played a part in drafting the new constitution, where he became known as a strong defender of his colony's interests. In 1901, he was elected to the new federal parliament representing the Division of East Sydney. Reid retained the leadership of the Free Trade Party after federation, became Australia's first Leader of the Opposition. For the first few years, the Protectionist Party governed with the support of the Labour Party. Alfred Deakin's Protectionist minority government collapsed in April 1904, he was succeeded by Labour's Chris Watson, who proved unable to govern and resigned after four months; as a result, Reid became prime minister in August 1904. He included four Protectionists in his cabinet, but was unable to achieve much before his government was brought down in July 1905.
One notable exception was the passage of the landmark Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration ACT, which dealt with industrial relations. At the 1906 election, Reid secured the most votes in the House of Representatives and the equal-most seats, but was well short of a majority and could not form government, he resigned as party leader after opposing the formation of the Commonwealth Liberal Party. Reid accepted an appointment as Australia's first High Commissioner to the United Kingdom in 1910, remained in the position until 1916, he subsequently won election to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, serving until his sudden death two years later. Reid was born on 25 February 1845 in Johnstone, Scotland, he was the fifth of seven children born to John Reid. He was named after George Houstoun, a former Conservative MP for the Renfrewshire constituency who had died a few years earlier. Reid's father, the son of a farmer, was born in Ayrshire. At the time of George's birth he was a minister in the Church of Scotland, which he had joined in 1839 after ministering in various secessionist Presbyterian churches.
In 1834, he had married the daughter of Edward Crybbace. In April 1845, Reid and his family moved to Liverpool, where his father had been appointed minister of an expatriate Presbyterian congregation, his two younger sisters were born there. The family struggled financially, his father made the decision to emigrate to Australia. Reid arrived in Melbourne in May 1852, his father subsequently led congregations in Essendon and North Melbourne, he moved the family to Sydney in 1858. Reid received his only formal schooling at the Melbourne Academy, now known as Scotch College, he received a classical education, in life recalled that he had "no appetite for that wide range of metaphysical propositions which juveniles were expected to comprehend". He left school aged about 13, when the family settled in Sydney, began working as a junior clerk in a merchant's counting house. At the age of 15 he joined the debating society at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, according to his autobiography, "a more crude novice than he had never begun the practise of public speaking".
In Sydney, Reid's father became a colleague of John Dunmore Lang at the Scots Church, from 1862 until his death in 1867 was the minister of the Mariners' Church on George Street. His mother, who died in 1885, was involved in the ragged schools movement. In life Reid praised his parents for his good upbringing. In 1864, Reid joined the New South Wales Civil Service as an assistant accountant in the Colonial Treasury, with an annual salary of £200, he was promoted to clerk of correspondence and contracts in 1868, chief clerk of correspondence in 1874 on a salary of £400. In 1876 he began to study law which would provide the independent income necessary to pursue a parliamentary career, he became head of the Attorney-General's Department in 1878. In 1879, Reid qualified as a barrister, he made a name for himself by publishing pamphlets on topical issues. In 1875, he published his Five Essays o
Canberra
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of 410,301, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall; the city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory, 280 km south-west of Sydney, 660 km north-east of Melbourne. A resident of Canberra is known as a Canberran. Although Canberra is the capital and seat of government, many federal government ministries have secondary seats in state capital cities, as do the Governor-General and the Prime Minister; the site of Canberra was selected for the location of the nation's capital in 1908 as a compromise between rivals Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two largest cities. It is unusual among Australian cities, being an planned city outside of any state, similar to Washington, D. C. in the United States, or Brasília in Brazil. Following an international contest for the city's design, a blueprint by American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin was selected and construction commenced in 1913.
The Griffins' plan featured geometric motifs such as circles and triangles, was centred on axes aligned with significant topographical landmarks in the Australian Capital Territory. The city's design was influenced by the garden city movement and incorporates significant areas of natural vegetation; the growth and development of Canberra were hindered by the World Wars and the Great Depression, which exacerbated a series of planning disputes and the ineffectiveness of a procession of bodies that were created in turn to oversee the development of the city. The national capital emerged as a thriving city after World War II, as Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies championed its development and the National Capital Development Commission was formed with executive powers. Although the Australian Capital Territory is now self-governing, the Commonwealth Government retains some influence through the National Capital Authority; as the seat of the government of Australia, Canberra is the site of Parliament House, the official residence of the Monarch's representative the Governor-General, the High Court and numerous government departments and agencies.
It is the location of many social and cultural institutions of national significance, such as the Australian War Memorial, Australian National University, Royal Australian Mint, Australian Institute of Sport, National Gallery, National Museum and the National Library. The Australian Army's officer corps is trained at the Royal Military College and the Australian Defence Force Academy is located in the capital; the ACT is independent of any state to prevent any one state from gaining an advantage by hosting the seat of Commonwealth power. The ACT has voting representation in the Commonwealth Parliament, has its own Legislative Assembly and government, similar to the states; as the city has a high proportion of public servants, the Commonwealth Government contributes the largest percentage of Gross State Product and is the largest single employer in Canberra, although no longer the majority employer. Compared to the national averages, the unemployment rate is the average income higher. Property prices are high, in part due to comparatively restrictive development regulations.
The word "Canberra" is popularly claimed to derive from the word Kambera or Canberry, claimed to mean "meeting place" in Ngunnawal, one of the Indigenous languages spoken in the district by Aboriginal Australians before European settlers arrived, although there is no clear evidence to support this. An alternative definition has been claimed by numerous local commentators over the years, including the Ngunnawal elder Don Bell, whereby Canberra or Nganbra means "woman's breasts" and is the indigenous name for the two mountains, Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie, which lie opposite each other. In the 1860s, the name was reported by Queanbeyan newspaper owner John Gale to be an interpretation of the name nganbra or nganbira, meaning "hollow between a woman's breasts", referring to the Sullivans Creek floodplain between Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain. An 1830s map of the region by Major Mitchell indeed does mark the Sullivan's Creek floodplain between these two mountains as "Nganbra". "Nganbra" or "Nganbira" could have been anglicised to the name "Canberry", as the locality soon become known to European settlers.
R. H. Cambage in his 1919 book Notes on the Native Flora of New South Wales, Part X, the Federal Capital Territory noted that Joshua John Moore, the first settler in the region, named the area Canberry in 1823 stating that "there seems no doubt that the original was a native name, but its meaning is unknown."' Survey plans of the district dated 1837 refer to the area as the Canberry Plain. In 1920, some of the older residents of the district claimed that the name was derived from the Australian Cranberry which grew abundantly in the area, noting that the local name for the plant was canberry. Although popularly pronounced or, the original pronunciation at its official naming in 1913 was. Before white settlement, the area in which Canberra would be constructed was seasonally inhabited by Indigenous Australians. Anthropologist Norman Tindale suggested the principal group occupying the region were the Ngunnawal people, while the Ngarigo lived to the south of the ACT, the Wandandian to the east, the Walgulu to the south, Gandangara people to the north and Wiradjuri to the north-west.
Archaeological evidence of settlement in the region includes inhabited rock shelters, rock paintings and engravings, burial places and quarry sites as well as stone tools and arrangements. Artefacts suggests early human activity occurred at some po
1913 Australian federal election
Federal elections were held in Australia on 31 May 1913. All 75 seats in the House of Representatives, 18 of the 36 seats in the Senate were up for election; the incumbent Labor Party, led by Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, was defeated by the opposition Commonwealth Liberal Party under Joseph Cook. The new government had a majority of just a single seat, held a minority of seats in the Senate, it would last only 15 months, suffering defeat at the 1914 election. The 1913 election was held in conjunction with six referendum questions. According to David Day, Andrew Fisher's biographer, "it was the timing of the referenda, most responsible for the disappointing election result" for the Labor Party. NotesThree members were elected unopposed -- one two Labor. Members in italics did not contest their seat at this election. Candidates of the 1913 Australian federal election Members of the Australian House of Representatives, 1913–1914 Members of the Australian Senate, 1913–1914 University of WA election results in Australia since 1890
1906 Australian federal election
Federal elections were held in Australia on 12 December 1906. All 75 seats in the House of Representatives, 18 of the 36 seats in the Senate were up for election; the incumbent Protectionist Party minority government led by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin retained government, despite winning the fewest House of Representatives votes and seats of the three parties. Parliamentary support was provided by the Labour Party led by Chris Watson, while the Anti-Socialist Party, led by George Reid, remained in opposition. Watson was replaced by Andrew Fisher; the Protectionist minority government fell in November 1908 to Labour, a few days before Reid resigned as Anti-Socialist leader, replaced by Joseph Cook. The Labour minority government fell in June 1909 to the newly formed Commonwealth Liberal Party led by Deakin; the party was formed on a shared anti-Labour platform as a merger between Deakin, leader of the Protectionists, Cook, leader of the Anti-Socialists, in order to counter Labour's growing popularity.
The merger didn't sit well with several of the more progressive Protectionists, who defected to Labour or sat as independents. The merger would allow the Deakin Commonwealth Liberals to construct a mid-term parliamentary majority, however less than a year at the 1910 election, Labour won both majority government and a Senate majority, representing a number of firsts: it was Australia's first elected federal majority government, Australia's first elected Senate majority, the world's first Labour Party majority government at a national level, after the 1904 Watson minority government the world's second Labour Party government at a national level; the 113 acts passed in the second Fisher government exceeded the output of the second Deakin government over a similar period. At the time, it represented the culmination of Labour's involvement in politics, it was a period of reform unmatched in the Commonwealth until the 1940s under John Curtin and Ben Chifley. NotesIndependent: Frederick Holder Seven members were elected unopposed – three Anti-Socialist, three Labour, one Protectionist.
NotesIndependent: William Trenwith The figures for the Anti-Socialist Party include Joseph Vardon, whose election was subsequently declared void, Henry Dobson, elected as part of the Revenue Tariff Party. It was the third federal election in Australia following the adoption of the federal government; the election was important as it would demonstrate which of the parties could hold together a stable government after the unstable second term of the previous one, which saw four different governments in power. It would see if all parties could survive the implementation of protectionist policies which differentiated the two; this was the first election where all seats for the House of Representatives were voted for via a First-past-the-post system, the first time that Tasmania was divided into separate electorates. The election result was the continuation of a Protectionist government led by Deakin and supported by Labour, which remained in power due to the unwillingness of the Anti-Socialist Party to support a vote of no confidence against it.
George Reid adopted a strategy of trying to reorient the party system along Labour vs non-Labour lines – before the election, he renamed his Free Trade Party to the Anti-Socialist Party. Reid envisaged a spectrum running from socialist to anti-socialist, with the Protectionist Party in the middle; this attempt struck a chord with politicians who were steeped in the Westminster tradition and regarded a two-party system as much the norm. Since the Protectionist primary platform of government tariffs had been dealt with by previous governments, the party had become somewhat redundant; those who remained were supporting the Party's leader, Alfred Deakin, rather than its policies. Of the three, the Labour Party, led by Chris Watson, now had the most realistic chance of becoming the dominant party after their gains in the 1903 election and after their leading status in the four minor states they were looking to make the same type of gains in Victoria and New South Wales; the first federal referendum in Australia's history was held in conjunction with the election.
The proposed alteration to the Constitution, to change the start date of Senators' terms from 1 January to 1 July, passed in all states and was carried. Members in italics did not contest their seat at this election. Candidates of the Australian federal election, 1906 Members of the Australian House of Representatives, 1906–1910 Members of the Australian Senate, 1907–1910 University of WA election results in Australia since 1890
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