AHC & WI: No White Australia Policy

[Rush Tarquin]

The challenge is to prevent the White Australia Policy.

Captain Obvious says, "This may require a very different colonisation of Australia with very different roles for civil administrators and workers in early Australian society. The Australian labour movement will probably have to be greatly retarded, at least at first."

For the WI part, how do you think Australian society would develop subsequently without such a policy? What is Australia if not the white working man's paradise?

 

[WhiteHawk]

Well, I can find a way to make Australia worse off. Without the Southern states constantly hectoring North Queensland over keeping Australia white, the supply of kanakas and coolies is kept constant from the 1870's to the 1930's. Queensland becomes majority non-white around 1910, with violently enforced segregation and miscegenation laws. Thanks to vastly multiplied profits in cash crops, North Queensland lobbies manage to prevent any major European waves of immigration after WW2, as they would be forced to increase wages for white immigrants. Successive waves of an Asian underclass arrive after the Chinese Civil War, Vietnam War and civil conflict in Indonesia , making up the bulk of Australia's agriculture, mining, and industry sectors. Perhaps she also refuses to let go of PNG, and even goes after Timor and some pacific islands. After the Cold War, Australia losses her role as the Wests bulwark against Asian Communism and is left as a highly stratified society reminiscent of Edwardian Great Britain.

When China (and to a lesser extent, the Asian Tigers a few decades earlier) emerges as a major power, Australia makes a deal with the devil and begins to export minerals to the great nation to the North. This promoted extensive investment in Australia, jingoism, and eventually a war with Indonesia over Timor Sea oil and natural gas. Australia is victorious, but sacrifices almost all international credibility and is forced into low intensity conflict in Bali, Lombok, Papua and Timor.

As the population is only around 35% non white, there is a very low danger of Revolution. After Apartheid ends, Australia gladly welcomes any and all Afrikaner, who make up the third major White group, alongside the Irish and the British. I just made Australia crapsack!

 

[Rush Tarquin]

What would be the effect on Australian society if more Chinese had hung around after the gold rushes and there hadn't been efforts to remove the Asian 'taint', like the Japanese pearlers in Broome? Surely more Japanese would emigrate to nearer Australia over South America if the option were available and the same would be true for OTL Asian immigrants to America and Canada of the period if Australian immigration restrictions were more lenient after America and Canada began restricting Asian immigration in the 1880s-1920s.

 

[Simreeve]

Well, I can find a way to make Australia worse off. Without the Southern states constantly hectoring North Queensland over keeping Australia white, the supply of kanakas and coolies is kept constant from the 1870's to the 1930's.

Coolies perhaps, but IOTL Britain and France both took steps to limit the supply of kanakas...

 

[HARRY]

There was some Indian immigration to Australia prefederation not as much as to Fiji, South Africa and the Caribbean. There were also many links to India through trade, the British Army and retired British Indian public servants who retired to Australia.

It is not so impossible to think that fearing the Russians (see the russian scare of 1885) would seize the northern, loyal Indians are recruited to settle the warmer northern reachs of Australia.