TIM WATTS MP
MEMBER FOR GELLIBRAND
ADDRESS TO AUSTRALIA INDIA INSTITUTE, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY
PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE LINKS IN THE AUSTRALIA-INDIA RELATIONSHIP: FROM WHITE AUSTRALIA TO WHAT?
WEDNESDAY, 8 AUGUST 2018
***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY**(Acknowledgements omitted)
I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay my respect to their elders past and present.
I would like to thank the Australia India Institute and Professor Craig Jeffrey for the generous invitation to speak tonight.
The AII is an important intellectual institution for deepening our understanding of a relationship that should be crucial to Australia's economic, strategic and cultural future - I'm honoured to be able to make a contribution.
It is customary for Australian commentators on the Australia-India relationship to begin by noting the unrealised potential of this relationship.
We note that our countries share a democratic, widespread use of the English language and a love of cricket - sometimes working in our shared passion for curry and MasterChef - and on this basis we imagine Australia and India to be natural international partners.
The conundrum of why these commonalities haven't in actuality resulted in a deeper relationship were summed up by one of the doyens of Australian foreign policy, Arthur Tange on his arrival in New Delhi as Australia's new High Commissioner in 1965 over fifty years ago.
Tange noted that that while there was 'fertile ground' between Australia and India, 'no-one seems to know what seed to plant'.
Fifty years on there is now an emerging consensus that one seed planted in this fertile ground may be beginning to sprout - our people-to-people relationships.
As an elected representative from Melbourne's West, where people of subcontinent heritages are the fastest growing communities in the fastest growing area of Australia, I see this every day.
Australia's ageing population and India's youth bulge create a demographic complementarity for migration between our nations.
Australia is now home to around 700,000 people who claim Indian ancestry - nearly 3% of our population - and Melbourne is home to nearly 2/3rds of Australia's Indian-born community.
Diwali, Holi, Navratri and Bathukamma are established fixtures of our community calendar and I've added Garba dancing to the list of skills that I didn't expect that I would learn as an MP.
Our cricket and hockey clubs would be unrecognisable without our players of subcontinent heritage and even the CEO of our AFL team, the Western Bulldogs, Ameet Bains, is of Indian-Australian heritage.
Given this I was pleased to see people-to-people links recently identified as one of the three 'pillars' for engagement with India in Peter Varghese's formidable "India Economic Strategy to 2035" report.
Indeed, Varghese correctly called people-to-people links the 'most significant asset of all' in Australia-India relations'.
These people-to-people links are not just important for building trade and investment relationships, but also shape mutual perceptions.
Varghese explains the 'soft' value people-to-people links, as going into the "nooks and crannies of a relationship where governments cannot. They can shape perceptions in a way governments cannot".
This is good stuff - and it's consistent with the approach the ALP has been taking to this issue over the past year.
Labor wants to drive a step-change in Australia's engagement with Asia and we've been developing a comprehensive, whole of government and whole of nation framework for this engagement called 'FutureAsia'.
Labor's Shadow Treasurer, Chris Bowen has committed to reporting to Parliament annually on progress against this framework.
As part of FutureAsia, a Shorten Labor government has committed to leveraging the knowledge and relationships of our diaspora through programs based on those long in place within the US State Department, to build people-to-people networks across governments, the not-for-profit and private sectors.
Tange couldn't have imagined the potential for an Indian-Australian diaspora to be our 'most significant asset' in the Australia-India relationship because when he sent his first report to Prime Minister Menzies, Australia was still trapped in the self-imposed bondage of the White Australia Policy.
In fact, as Australian migration and multiculturalism expert Dr James Jupp has written, the first people to be denied entry into Australia for failing the Immigration Restriction Act's infamous dictation test were two men from northern India - the Act having come into force while their ship, the Kumano Maru was already en route.
The insult to these two men was especially egregious as both were fellow British subjects and were even veterans of the Imperial Army in service of common cause with Australian soldiers.
The affront led to one man becoming quote "so distraught that he had to be roped and dragged."
The incident prompted a petition from the Indian residents of Victoria to the Colonial Office, an office with significant experience of complaints about the White Australia policy by that stage, questioning why Indians who had fought in service of the British cause were denied entry when Germans, Russians and Italians were waved through without molestation.
The White Australia Policy remained a major obstacle to relations between Australia and India for decades - one of Tange's predecessors as High Commissioner, Roy Gollan had even advised the government in 1949 that:
"Australia is now being specifically named with South Africa when the question of racial discrimination is ventilated in the Indian press".
This was an apt comparison as the dictation test had originally been pioneered in the South African province of Natal as an instrument for restricting Indian migration to the region before being adopted in Australian colonies at the suggestion of the Colonial Office as a compromise to an outright ban on non-white migration.
It was diplomatic cables like this that lead to the External Affairs department being one of the most consistent bureaucratic resistors to the White Australia policy - they could see the damage it did to us better than most.
The thinking that underpinned the White Australia Policy was based on the assumption that there was something intrinsic in non-white people, that left them congenitally unable to embrace the egalitarian values of the nation we were building here.
This thinking was laid bare in the classic 1886 statement from the editor of The Bulletin, James Edmond, explaining the adoption of the publication's banner "Australia for the white man".
Edmond declared:
"By the term Australian we mean not those who have merely been born in Australia. All white men who come to these shores - with a clean record - and who leave behind them the memory of class-distinctions and the religious differences of the old world; all men who place the happiness, the prosperity, the advancement of their adopted country before the interests of Imperialism, are Australian. In this regard all men who leave the tyrant-ridden lands of Europe for freedom of speech and right of personal liberty are Australians before they set foot on the ship which brings them hither. Those who fly from an odious military conscription; those who leave their fatherland because they cannot swallow the worm-eaten lie of the divine right of kings to murder peasants, are Australians by instinct - Australian and republican are synonymous."
Noble indeed!
But there was a catch.
A limit to these egalitarian Australian values that the Bulletin went on to make brutally clear:
"No n*****r, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour, is an Australian."
By the thinking of the formative years of our nation, anyone who wanted to resist the injustices of the old world was an Australian for merely having this thought, but no non-white man or woman could ever cross this threshold.
It was not, until 1958 that the dictation test was abolished in Australia, and not until 1972 that the last remnants of formal racial discrimination were removed from our immigration system.
It's an ugly part of our history - but one worth reflecting on as we embark on a hopeful new chapter in the Australian-Indian relationship.
Today, the context for people-to-people links between Australia and India has changed radically.
Reforms of Australia's immigration system emanating from an unl
