Australian immigration has a chequered history. Immigration to the continent now called Australia began over 50,000 years ago, when the ancestors of Australian Aborigines arrived via Indonesia and New Guinea. Europeans began landing in the 1600's and 1700's, and the country was colonised by Britain in 1788.
A reputation as a tolerant nation with strong humanitarian values is marred by past government policies excluding non-whites, and more recently a succession of scandals resulting in much criticism of Australia’s refugee programs.
Arrival of Aborigines
Humans first arrived in Australia through Indonesia and New Guinea, either by paddling canoes across the Timor Sea or by crossing a land bridge across what is now Torres Strait, between New Guinea and Australia. Estimates of the date vary considerably: the best current guess is about 53,000 years ago, but much room for debate remains.
Colonisation and settlement by Britain
After the loss of the United States, Britain felt a need to find an alternative destination to take the population of its overcrowded prisons (full mainly due to the unemployment created by the Industrial Revolution) and needed somewhere to send their overflow. In 1787 the First Fleet of 11 ships and about 1350 people under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip set sail for Australia. On January 26, 1788—a date now both celebrated and mourned as Australia Day)—a landing was made at Sydney Cove. The new colony was formally proclaimed as the Colony of New South Wales on February 7. Thus European settlement began with a troupe of petty criminals, second-rate soldiers, and a crew of sailors.
From about 1815 the colony began to grow rapidly as free settlers arrived and new lands were opened up for farming. Despite the long and arduous sea voyage, settlers were attracted by the prospect of making a new life on virtually free Crown land. Many settlers occupied land without authority: they were known as squatters and became the basis of a powerful landowning class. As a result of agitation by the free settlers, transportation of convicts to Sydney ended in 1840, although it continued to the smaller colonies of Van Diemen's Land (where settlement began in 1803) and Moreton Bay (founded 1824, and later renamed Queensland for some years longer. The small settlement of Perth, founded in 1829 on the Swan River in Western Australia, failed to prosper and actually asked for convicts.
Gold rush era: arrival of other Europeans and Chinese
The discovery of gold, beginning in 1851 first at Bathurst in New South Wales and then in the Port Phillip District (now Victoria), transformed Australia economically, politically and demographically. It led to an enormous expansion in population, including for the first time large numbers of Irish Catholics, Germans and other Europeans, and Chinese.
White Australian Policy
Main article: White Australia policy
One of the motives for creating a Federated Australia was the need for a common immigration policy. There was much resistance to Chinese immigration and the importing of indentured workers from New Caledonia to work in the Queensland sugar industry.
The White Australia Policy, the policy of excluding all non white people from the Australian continent, was the official policy of all governments and all mainstream political parties in Australia from the 1890s to the 1950s, and elements of the policy survived until the 1970s. Although the expression “White Australia Policy” was never in official use, it was common in political and public debate throughout the period.
Postwar immigration
After World War II, Australia launched a massive immigration program, believing that having narrowly avoided a Japanese invasion, Australia must "populate or perish." Hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans, including for the first time large numbers of Jews, migrated to Australia. More than two million people immigrated to Australia from Europe during the 20 years after the end of the war. Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia became major sources of immigrants, later followed by Turkey and Lebanon. Australia actively sought these immigrants, with the government assisting many of them and they found work due to an expanding economy and major infrastructure projects like the Snowy Mountains Scheme. This wave of immigration greatly changed the character of Australian society, which before the war had been monocultural, inward-looking and conservative. Immigration was still restricted to Europeans in most circumstances, although the White Australia policy was gradually eased from the 1950s onwards.
Pauline Hanson
In the 1996 election Pauline Hanson was elected to the federal seat of Oxley. In her maiden speech to the House of Representatives, which instantly made headlines and the television news bulletins right across Australia, she expressed her concern that Australia "will be swamped by Asians". This message exposed a population deeply divided on the issue of immigration.
She went on to form the One Nation Party, which subsequently won nearly one quarter of the vote in Queensland state elections. The name "One Nation" was meant to signify national unity, in contrast to what Hanson claimed to see as an increasing division in Australian society caused by government policies favoring migrants (multiculturalism) and indigenous Australians.
The One Nation Party went into decline due to internal divisions, however it is accepted that one factor in its popularity was an underlying xenophobia in the Australian population. The main political parties picked up on this, hardening their immigration and refugee policies, and setting the stage for the refugee controversies of 2001-2005.
Prime Minister John Howard's campaigning on issues of "border protection" at the 2001 federal election were widely seen as a successful effort to win One Nation voters back to the Liberal and National parties.
Refugee controversies
In the early 1990s Australian immigration legislation was changed dramatically, introducing the concept of mandatory detention of unathorised arrivals, who were popularly referred to as boat people. With a sharp rise in unathorised boat arrivals in the late 1990’s, mostly from war-torn countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the Howard government enforced mandatory detention with a new zeal, in addition to developing a new doctrine of preventing refugee boats from landing, by force if necessary. This came to international attention during the Tampa affair of 2001.
During the 2001 election campaign, immigration and border protection became the hot issue, as a result of incidents such as the Tampa affair, Children overboard affair, and the sinking of the SIEV-X. This was a major factor contributing to the victory of the Coalition, deemed impossible only a few months earlier, and also marked the beginning of the controversial Pacific Solution.
After the election, the government continued with its hard line on unathorised arrivals of asylum seekers. Legislation was developed to excise certain islands from Australia’s migration zone meaning if asylum seekers landed on an excised island, Australia was not required to fulfill its obligations under international humanitarian law.
By 2004, the number of unathorised boat arrivals had reduced dramatically. The government argued that this was the result of its strong policy towards asylum seekers. Others argued that the decrease was the result of global factors, such as changing circumstances in the primary source nations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
