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I spent a while in the last thread talking about immigration and Australian national identity, and it sort of only really just clicked for me how much the formation of that identity was bound up with the demise of the British Empire itself.
It's really obvious when you look at early Australian politics and writing how core the connection with Britain was. You could have a White Australia Policy because the answer to the question "who are we" was "British". Chinese aren't British, so they can't be Australian. But as time goes on that connection becomes weaker and more contested. For example this speech from PM Billy Hughes during World War 1:
At this stage Australia is a young nation, having federated less than 20 years prior. In most people's memory are the times of being colonies rather than a country. Hughes is giving a full throated defence of the British Empire, and explicitly rejecting the idea of a unique Australian identity distinct from the Empire. And he goes on to win the election convincingly. But it's clear that he's speaking in a context where these ideas and values are no longer universal, where some people are starting to think that Australia should be its own thing.
It would not be until after WW2 that Britain really began divesting itself of its colonial holdings - but these things happen slowly and you can see the increasing loss of belief in the Empire reflected in statements like Hughes'. I'm not sure whether it was that the Empire declined and "Australianism" rose to fill the void, or that "Australianism" naturally grew and outcompeted "Britishness". But regardless of which force was the driving cause, it's axiomatic that you can only have one highest loyalty.
So as we gain our own self conception as a country and as "Australian" ceases to mean "British" the rationale for the White Australia Policy fades away as well. It isn't overturned in one dramatic act as an explicit rejection of racism, but rather falls apart piecemeal bit by bit as the rules get adjusted incrementally. After WW2 there is a movement to grow Australia's population to make it better able to stand up for itself in times of war - "populate or perish" is the mantra, and the doors get opened to non-British europeans in order to make that happen. Harold Holt allows Australian soldiers to bring back Japanese "war brides". Asians are allowed to come to study. In 1958, a pathway is created for "distinguished and highly qualified" Asians. During the Vietnam war, South Vietnamese refugees escaping the Viet Cong are warmly welcomed as our allies, with my grandparents among many others taking a Vietnamese family into their home.
Most of this happens under conservative governments. There's some resistance on racist grounds to the crumbling of the White Australia Policy - particularly from Arthur Calwell, the long time opposition Labor leader. Calwell's vision of Australia was one of a "white" nation rather than a "British" nation:
Calwell of course was Immigration Minister in the Chifley government and was the one who initiated the influx of non-British immigrants while at the same time degrading Australia's links to the British Empire.
But "whiteness" has poor appeal as an organising principle. Once you abandon the idea of being specifically British, it becomes hard to justify why the Germans and Italians (who we fought against) are more kin to us than the South Vietnamese (who we fought alongside). So Calwell's vision never comes to pass - Australia never meaningfully exists as a "white" country that isn't also British, and once we cease to see ourselves as a part of the Empire we also start welcoming Asians and other non-Europeans into our conception of what Australia is.
And it works. Back when I was younger there were fierce debates over "multiculturalism" as opposed to "assimilation". It was an intra-white culture war that has gone away almost entirely these days, as the immigrants we used to argue about have grown in number and taken their own role in shaping the course of our society. It turns out they mostly don't want to be stuck in racial ghettos and seen as seperate from the majority. The multiculturalists have found themselves with nothing to defend and the assimilationists have found themselves with nothing to attack.
(as an aside, one of the things I really like about most non-Anglo Australians is their casual dismissal of the woke mind virus that finds purchase among the minds of the Anglo left. There are few things more eye-rolling than a company's Anglo leadership making their mostly foreign-born workforce sit through cultural sensitivity training. Likewise, we had a minor family drama at our last Christmas get together when one of my aunts - a white sociologist - decided to give another of my aunts - a working class Croatian - a lecture about how as "a person from the former Yugoslavia" she didn't really understand how bad racism is.)
I love my country and what it is. It's absurd to me to think of an Englishman as being more "my people" than the Macedonian and Lebanese and Aboriginal and Sudanese players playing our national sport. It's absurd to me to think of the Indonesian and Chinese families at my kids school who willingly sacrificed birthday parties and family events to fight covid in our community as less "my people" than the white Americans who called our country a dictatorship for it. We're united by bushfires that turn the sky red and floods the size of seas. We are bound by so much more than blood.
I agree with all this, but I want to add a caution from the perspective of immigrant Australia.
It's normal common in my immigrant community to:
This combination is far more common than my own eccentric notion of actually being a patriotic Australian.
All of this sounds like it's the polar opposite of what @AshLeal is claiming, but no. The people I'm talking about are perfectly well acculturated and behave well among other Australian folk, work on common projects with each other.
Here's the thing, though: that's a fair-weather friendship. The moment those people find their home and Australia at odds, they're traitors. And it's rational for other Australians to notice that and - particularly in cases where their home is likely to be at odds with Australia in the reasonably-near future, i.e. the PRC - to want less of these people around; they're quite literally lower-EV than other immigrants and plausibly negative-EV.
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No, but it make it seem rather superficial.
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