It was only in the 1969 election that Labor even got to 40 per cent preference amongst tertiary students, and it was only in 1972 that polls suggested a majority of students, for the first time ever, supported Labor. It was only about 1972, also, that a majority of graduates began to swing towards Labor.
All these major changes coincided with the massive expansion of university education to social groups that had never previously had access to it. In this wonderful period of the expansion of tertiary education to new layers, there were a number of significant secondary features. For instance, in 1967 the extra school year was introduced in New South Wales.
As a result, the only freshers in universities were a large cohort of mature-age students who were encouraged to take advantage of the gap year to start university education. (This was the year when the Vietnam antiear protests, incidentally, really began to gather momentum, and it is my very distinct memory that many of these mature-age students, who by then knew a bit about the world, were in the forefront of this development.)
A little later, throughout the 1970s the very notable phenomenon took place of mature-age women students taking advantage of scholarships and the Whitlam free education to get degrees, and many of these women became rather belligerent feminists, having previous been deprived of tertiary education by social circumstances.
In short, the combination of all these factors produced a massive change in the moral, cultural and political climate of the times, and this had a very big and happily enduring impact on the generations who acquired their education in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time of great inquiry, criticism and change.
It may have had its aberrations and eccentricities, but it was a great time to be alive. In this period, as I observed and experienced it, a number of previously latent currents in Australian society came to a certain flowering, such as the basically healthy ethical training in relation to matters like race and migration in Catholic schools.
This was the period when the products of the Catholic education system formed a disproportionate part of the undergraduate population, having been well instructed by the brothers and nuns to take full advantage of all the Whitlam period educational opportunities available to them, which pitched them headlong into the political and cultural radicalisation of the period.
The substantial swing among students and graduates in this period against racism, did owe a lot to the educational revolution of the period, but it also owed a lot to the new moral climate that emerged in these conditions, which actually corresponds more adequately to basic civilised human instincts than the bigoted backwardness that the Katharine Betts of this world believe is normal in human beings.
Happily, these more civilised attitudes have persisted among people who acquired their education over this period. It's their normal state of being in relation to all these matters. There may be a certain amount of group identification in it as well, but that's no bad thing either! It's better to be a proud member of the generation of 1968 or 1972, in my view, than to be a dopey bigot.
Over the last few years I have time and time again had the experience of graduates of the classes of 1968 or 1972 bringing their children into my bookshop, reminiscing about the past and attempting to introduce their sometimes rather bored kids to the delights of Furry Freak Brothers comics and the serious literature of the period.
It is my impression that the decisive sea change on cultural matters, censorship, politics, race and migration made in the 1960s and 1970s, by many people who were educated then, tends to persist into the next generation. Even if the children of the class of 1968 or 1972 are sometimes a bit bored by them, they tend to retain the basic values acquired by their parents during the great sea change.
How Betts, Birrell and company worry about Sydney. Bob Gould live from Gomorrah
A rather bizarre aspect of the 25-year Betts-Birrell crusade against migration and multiculturalism is the particular attention these Anglo-Victorians always give to the perceived problems of life in Sydney. Over the period they have made constant dire predictions of social, environmental and economic disaster in Sydney, and later events have mostly proved them wrong.
Over this period Sydney has constantly evolved. There are real problems in Sydney, many of which stem from the successful economic development of Sydney and NSW. A very serious and worthwhile Sydney economist, Phil Raskell, has made his recent life work the careful documentation of, for instance, such things as the widening economic inequality in Sydney.
For this useful project, he has worked extensively on the public statistical records of who pays tax and at what level. But Phil Raskell never overloads his useful and thoroughly commendable work on income inequality, with the vehement anti-migration and anti-development rhetoric that the Monash group does. They tend to grab hold of Phil's economic work, whenever it is published, and then they put their own unpleasant anti-migration spin on it.
Sydney is a very significant city. It has been in the forefront of Australian economic development since the early years of the 20th century. It is now, in fact, Australia's economic and financial capital, and it is the city in Australasia that is most locked into global financial markets and to trade in the region.
It is Australia's global city, and has a similar role to New York, Shanghai, Bombay or London in the US, China, India or Britain. It is at the bottom end in Australia for unemployment and the top end for job creation. It has always had a distinct ethnic and cultural mix.
In the 19th century, Sydney and NSW were widely noted for having the highest proportion of Irish Catholics in the country. For the past 15 years Sydney has been the favoured point of entry for the spectacular wave of Asian migration, and about half the Asians who come to Australia have Sydney as their first preference.
Sydney and NSW have historically had by far the longest period of state Labor governments in Australia. The Labor Party started here in 1891. The defeat of the conscription referendum in 1916 was a product of the size of the Catholic population in NSW and the strength of the labour movement in this state.
NSW was also the site of the greatest ever popular mobilisation of the labour movement against the ruling class during the Lang period in the 1930s. At this moment we have a state Labor government almost as firmly entrenched as two earlier governments, the one led by McKell and the one led by Wran. The present electorally very successful Premier in this Labor government looks like Pinocchio, can't drive a car (like myself), is well known for his literary and historical interests, and is married to a confident Asian migrant, a businesswoman, Helena. He has just been re-elected as Premier in one of the biggest electoral swings in recent history.
Sydney is full of the bustle and activity that so pained one of the literary anti-migrationists. Sydneysiders rather like this bustle and activity, because it means jobs and incomes.
Sydney does have plenty of problems. There is increasing inequality. Housing prices are much higher than elsewhere, which is good for those who own a house, but bad for those who are starting out. Taken as a whole, however, the problems of Sydney are not insoluble and they are not made worse by migration.
Migration actually produces an economic prosperity that lays a basis for the solution of many of these problems. Even the poorest cohort in Sydney, people who live in the Western suburbs, have increased economic opportunities because of the nature of Sydney. The Victorian academics who use Sydney as a shock-horror example of the consequences of migration, are at a considerable loss for an explanation for this basic conundrum. If Sydney is so bad, why is it the favoured point of settlement for about half the people who wish to migrate to Australia?
Their Arthur Calwell and mine
Both Thompson and Birrell wax lyrical about different things said by Arthur Calwell in his autobiography. I find their colonisation of Calwell thoroughly offensive. Calwell is one of my heroes. I actually knew Calwell and had some political dealings with him. I revere him for the following things that he did in his life:
· His opposition to conscription and support for Irish independence during the First World War, which earned him a military intelligence file.
· His opposition, from within a Labor cabinet, to conscription during the Second World War.
· His decisive role in starting mass migration from non-British sources in 1946, which included helping Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and pushing aside the rabid Melbourne establishment anti-Semitism of the time.
· His solid support for the Labor side against the Groupers during the Split.
· His courageous and far-sighted opposition to the Vietnam War and conscription, which was the context in which I had dealings with him. He was quite willing to speak for our hard-nosed and militant Sydney Vietnam Action Committee, despite the fact that we were denounced by many of the "official Left" as splitting Trotskyists.
Calwell was a complex, courageous and intelligent man, but he was a man of his place and time, with some of the religious and cultural prejudices that came from his background.
Predictably, Thompson and Betts celebrate only his most backward statements and attitudes, which suit their reactionary purposes. In my view, Calwell's great contribution to the Australian labour movement and Australian life will endure after this petty colonisation of his legacy has been forgotten.
The area in which Calwell's weaknesses were striking were his attitude to race and his moralistic attitude to questions like censorship and sexuality. In both these areas the absolutely fundamental cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s are irreversible. The vast majority of the people, whose origins are in the robust Irish Catholic layer of Australian society, who had their education in the 1960s and 1970s, have a totally different attitude now, on questions such as sexuality, censorship and race.
Like me, quite a few of those people respect Calwell's contribution on the other matters, but they laugh in a slightly embarrassed and amused way about just those things that Thompson and Betts celebrate in Calwell, because as a social group, the Irish Catholic-identified section of the Australian population have painfully shed those prejudices -- rather more so, possibly, than Anglo-Australians.
We respect Calwell for his great contribution, but we understand him as a man of his place and time, and there's not the slightest chance that his backward prejudices on some matters will strike any chord at all among the majority of those who come from the cultural background that he came from. It is really cynically eccentric for reactionary Anglos like Betts and Thompson to be hanging their hats on Calwell's weaknesses. I revere Calwell, but he belongs to us, not to them!
Why Betts and company can't win
The Betts-Birrell bunch have been conducting an energetic and resourceful campaign against migration and multiculturalism for the past 25 years, and this new outbreak is only the latest episode in their campaign. In my view they have to be combated and opposed, but happily I don't think they have much chance of winning. Australian society has evolved well and truly past them.
If you look at the books that they have published at intervals during the course of this campaign, the actual scale of migration that has taken place subsequently has tended to be at the top end of their direst predictions, and at the top end of their predictions for Asian composition etc.
Happily, none of their gloomy prophecies of social disintegration, racial conflict and other baleful results from this high immigration, have taken place. In fact, throughout the period, there has been a steady, small decline in unemployment during periods of fairly high migration -- a real conundrum for Betts and company -- and a steady improvement in prosperity and economic activity, despite the obvious persistence and even widening of inequality.
The decisive major obstacle to their campaign to stop migration stems, however, from the real class formations that currently prevail in urban Australia that I have described above. In modern urban Australia, the population is now so diverse and marriage and family formation has now such an exogamous element, that the objective basis for nativist opposition to migration and multiculturalism of the Betts-Birrell-Sheehan sort is constantly being eroded by the new social circumstances.
All Australian tertiary institutions outside the smallest provincial centres are now ethnically and culturally diverse and produce many, many multiracial couples in all levels of society, from the poorest to the very richest. Most urban schools are now ethnically and culturally diverse, with the same result. The civilised attitude of both the Liberal-voting managerial group, and the Labor-voting public service and education group, among university graduates, is not going to change.
The next layer, the bank clerks etc, are also ethnically and culturally diverse, and opposition to migration is steadily declining among these people because of the diversity of the group. The bottom segment of urban society is overwhelmingly made up of recent migrants. In one of her asides, Katharine Betts remarks that, from her point of view, the group that she found in her old opinion polls who had the highest figure of support for migration and multiculturalism, were that dogged, hard-core, pro-migration group, NESB migrants with university degrees.
Well, of course, that group is growing constantly as well. In the real terms of actually evolving Australian society, many of the arguments of the anti-migration lobby are educated atavisms and unpleasant shrieks from the primeval past, but we have to work hard, educate people and campaign vigorously to keep it that way.
Robert Birrell and the Monash anti-immigrationists are at it again
You have to hand it to the Robert Birrell, Monash University bunch. They don't give up on their 25-year campaign against immigration, and their more recent campaign against Asian immigration, which they try to cloak in a show of concern for the migrants they investigate. They have just produced a new study aimed at highlighting the number of recent migrants who are in poor social groups. (Article in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 19, 1998, page 3, by John Marsh)
This is a slightly new spin in their long campaign against migration. The last time I remember one of their studies being highlighted in the press, they concentrated on the notion of alleged Vietnamese ghettos in Cabramatta, Sydney and Richmond, Melbourne.
This line of argument was refuted by other demographers and migration consultants, who were able to satisfactorily establish that Birrell and company were wildly overstating the ghetto angle and that the concentration of Indo-Chinese, for instance, in Cabramatta and Richmond was less than 20 per cent.
Obviously, the ghetto argument wasn't terribly successful among serious commentators, although it has been considerably more successful in the spher of urban myth spread by people such as Pauline Hanson and Paul Sheehan.
Therefore, Birrell and company have produced a new study, in which they look for concentrations of poor people from a number of non-English-speaking backgrounds, in certain working-class suburbs around Sydney. What an amazing discovery! Poor, non-English-speaking migrants tend to be concentrated in poorer working-class suburbs. Gee whiz!
The underlying bias of the Monash Centre for Population and Urban Research against migrants and migration is made very clear in Birrell's reported comments, in which he uses his "discoveries" as a chance to once again repeat his long-standing attacks on multiculturalism and immigration.
A few questions must be asked about Birrell's study. Did he try to track the Asian and other non-English-speaking migrants alongside, say, a study of English speakers of rought the same socio-economic group in the same suburbs?
He obviously got his idea for selectively tracking non-English-speakers from the excellent research work of Phil Raskell who, for many years, has been studying the breakdown of economic power and income in Sydney, Who is Rich and Who is Poor?, and doing it as one properly should, not for migrants alone but for the whole population.
In his studies, exactly the same suburbs that Birrell mentions emerge as centres of poverty for both migrants and English-speakers. Birrell has turned this normal demographic inquiry into class, income and status, into a value-loaded attack on recent migrants.
The tendency of recent and poorer migrants to concentrate in already-existing poorer working class areas, is in fact obvious, and has existed right back to the first European settlement in Australia. For instance, from the middle of the 19th century, when Sydney began rapidly developing as a big port city, the poorest suburbs were the city itself, which had an enormous population in those days, Glebe, Chippendale, Ultimo, Pyrmont and Camperdown.
Studies in those days showed those suburbs to be the areas inhabited by the poorest working-class and even lumpen-proletarian people.
Census figures in those days, which listed occupations, showed a preponderance of labourers, domestics, unemployed and some tradesmen in those suburbs. They also showed a sharp religious imbalance in Sydney suburbs. The poorer working-class areas that I've just named had a much higher preponderance of Irish Catholics, around 40 per cent of the population, whereas richer people tended to live in the outer suburbs of Sydney, such as Petersham, Canterbury and Ashfield, and these suburbs were only about 15 per cent Irish Catholic.
The anti-migrant bigots of those days, largely from the British Protestant upper crust of the colony, used to regard the predominantly working-class Irish Catholic suburbs as cesspools of poverty and iniquity.
Further on in Irish history, in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the suburbs Birrell mentions had a high proportion of Greek, Italian, Polish and Yugoslav migrants, who in their time, were also much poorer when they arrived, for the obvious reasons.
Many studies were done in the 1950s and 1960s showing the poverty of the newer working-class migrants from European countries, and there was much clucking by the Robert Birrells of the time about Greek, Italian, Maltese and Yugoslav alleged ghettos. The irony is that many of the suburbs discussion the 1950s and 1960s in relation to the older European migrants are the same suburbs that Birrell talks about now.
All any of this underlines is the obvious point that the poorer cohort of every wave of migration tend to end up in the poorer suburbs.
As sugar coating on his essentially racist approach, Birrell mentions that there are many Asian migrants in Sydney who are affluent and do well, and who live in suburbs other than the ones he names, and he implies that their immigration may be all right. This, of course, raises the obvious question: is he demanding that only already affluent Asians be allowed in? This seems to be implied in his attack on family reunion and high levels of migration of less-skilled Asians.
Civilised Australians of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds, who have some sens of Australian history, should consider that Australia has been for most of its existence a country of rapid mass migration. This migration has always been dominated by poorer people looking for a new life and better chance in a new country.
Poorer migrants have always outnumbered richer migrants. This was true of the Irish in the 19th century and the Europeans in the post-war years. I bet Birrell did not conduct a survey among the poor migrants on whom he descended as to whether they preferred being in Australia or in the poorer countries from which they came.
The answers they would give in any such survey are pretty obvious. Mostly, even difficult conditions in Australia are better than the conditions in their countries of origin, and it's this impulse that drives all mass migrations.
Birrell's concern for these poor people can be dismissed as crocodile tears, overlain on a constant and implacable desire to keep out the people from the nether world who he views as threatening the Australian social fabric.
Civilised Australians should mobilise vigorously, as a lot are, in defence of the general policy of keeping Australia's doors reasonably open to migrants from many countries on a non-racist basis, and on a basis that allows poorer people to migrate as well as richer people.
