Why so many of our fears have proved unfounded
It is strange how many of our greatest fears as a nation have failed to materialise.
White settlement ushered in more than the massacre of many First Nations peoples, an attempt to destroy their culture and an obscene policy aimed at “breeding out Aboriginality”. It ushered in a fear of the “other”. “Other” being anyone who wasn’t of British stock. Anyone who wasn’t white.
The first settlers and their descendants were fearful of our First Peoples to the extent that they posed a threat to their plans to turn this country into a European settlement replete with European flora and fauna. Sadly, for them much of the flora died and a lot of the fauna went on to cause untold damage to their dreams of turning the continent into farming land. They disposed of any threat from Indigenous people but couldn’t do much about the climate.
Fear raised its ugly head during the Gold Rushes when people, including many Chinese people, came from around the world to seek their fortunes on the goldfields. Authorities weren’t too concerned about the hard drinking, brawling, often violent white people who flooded onto the goldfields. The rule of the gun kept them pretty much in line if they got out of hand and started demanding for rights as they famously did at the Eureka Stockade. The real worry was the Chinese and their propensity for hard work and clean living. The practice of many Chinese of sifting through other diggers tailings and finding more gold than they had found led to retribution, both physical and verbal.
And so began Australia’s fear of Asia and Asians.
The first referendum held on this continent was held in order to centralise government and, amongst other things, to take control of Indigenous affairs. This led to the infamous Aboriginal Protection Act.
White people were already fearful of an invasion of “non-whites” into the country. To prevent his happening the Immigration Restriction Act was introduced in 1901 as one of the first acts of the new Federal Government. This act was passed specifically to restrict people who might have worked harder and for less than white people. They included not only Chinese people but Pacific Islanders who had been brought in to pick sugar cane in Queensland.
Fear continued to play an important role in the political landscape into the 1920’s when Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, a staunch supporter of the White Australia policy, warned that communism was a threat to our way of life. This being despite the fact that, in 1925, the Communist Party had only a handful of members. The media of the day, particularly the Daily Telegraph, fuelled this fear by asserting that the Labor Party was soft on “restricted immigration”.
As if to prove this assertion wrong, revered Prime Minister John Curtin opined that “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”. Thus, reaffirming Labor’s commitment to the White Australia Policy.
All the while, fear of Indigenous culture and the implementation of the Aboriginal Protection Act, led to Indigenous children being taken from their families and re-distributed around Australia in a vain attempt to destroy First Nations culture by integrating the Stolen Generations into white society.
The leader of the Federal Opposition, Robert Menzies, played on our fears to blame post WW2 food and petrol shortages on “the Government’s supine surrender to a minority of Communists and agitators”. After Mao’s ascension to power in China, Menzies doubled down on these fears by adding our paranoia about the “yellow peril” to the mix. By doing so he swept to power in 1949. Menzies never lost sight of the powerful effect a “red scare” could have on the Australian people and managed to remain Prime Minister for seventeen years. He enthusiastically warned of “reds under the bed” as J. Edgar Hoover did in scaring Americans about the communist threat.
Fear dominated Australian politics for the full twenty three years of Liberal rule. It took us to Vietnam, fuelled by the “domino theory” that scared people into worrying that if Vietnam fell to communism South-East Asian countries to Australia’s north would similarly fall, “like dominos”.
Fast forward to the 1980’s after the “red scare” had proven to be a myth and the Liberal Party looked elsewhere to scare the Australian population. The flow of Vietnamese, escaping from a country where we had been fighting, scared many Australians. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq led to many people seeking refuge in this country. They were doing so to escape the regimes we were actively engaged in fighting against. However, led by John Howard and Peter Dutton, the Liberal Party managed to demonise these refugees and put the fear of God into Australians in doing so. “We will decide who comes to this country”, Howard famously and effectively dog whistled. The result of this was the creation of an Immigration Detention policy that many Australians supported.
What is extraordinary about these fear campaigns is that they have proven to be completely unfounded.
After Gough Whitlam abandoned the White Australia policy something like 80,000 Vietnamese sought refuge in Australia. Like the thousands of Chinese who settled here after the goldrushes, they have done nothing but enrich this country. The same could be said of any of the migrant communities that have settled here despite the dog whistling of many of the prominent Australians who are now leading the No Campaign.
The No Campaign is playing on the fears of many Australians. Like similar scare campaigns throughout our history, they have proven to be unfounded.