Overview
"Two groups of asylum seekers arrived in Australia in 1999: refugees from Kosovo, and boat people from China. The first group was welcomed with open arms; the others were interned." "Don McMaster analyses Australia's discriminatory policy towards the group that it has constructed as its 'other': the 'hordes from the north', the 'yellow peril'. He locates the earliest fear of 'Asians' in attitudes to Chinese goldminers in the 1850s. Half a century later this fear culminated in the White Australia policy, enshrined in the first legislation of the new federal Parliament. Thus the very beginnings of Australia's immigration policy were explicitly racist." Asylum Seekers sheds new light on events of the last few decades, from the first refugee policy of the Fraser Government, to the Blainey immigration debates of the 1980s and the moral panic about 'Asianation' articulated by Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s.Synopsis
"Two groups of asylum seekers arrived in Australia in 1999: refugees from Kosovo, and boat people from China. The first group was welcomed with open arms; the others were interned." "Don McMaster analyses Australia's discriminatory policy towards the group that it has constructed as its 'other': the 'hordes from the north', the 'yellow peril'. He locates the earliest fear of 'Asians' in attitudes to Chinese goldminers in the 1850s. Half a century later this fear culminated in the White Australia policy, enshrined in the first legislation of the new federal Parliament. Thus the very beginnings of Australia's immigration policy were explicitly racist." Asylum Seekers sheds new light on events of the last few decades, from the first refugee policy of the Fraser Government, to the Blainey immigration debates of the 1980s and the moral panic about 'Asianation' articulated by Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s.