Perhaps Labor leader Bill Shorten should be credited for putting the best face possible on his party’s new border and immigration policies.
At last month’s national conference, he surprised many rank and file members by convincing Labor’s formidable factions to overhaul Labor’s immigration policy, which now permits a future Labor government to turn boats of asylum seekers around at sea.
That is, to send them back to where they came from.
Shorten insisted this was consistent with Labor values, and this contention is less strange than many believe.
Labor has had a traditionally tough line on immigration policy, only recently attempting to balance the breadth of opinion within its ranks with the contradictory views in the community.
The fact remains that Labor and union values have always been anti-immigration, and it was the architect of much of the institutional racism that plagued us in the twentieth century.
In 1900 Labor adopted a party platform at its Sydney national conference of “total exclusion of coloured and other undesirable races”.
Legislation for the White Australia Policy almost failed in the early part of the twentieth century because Labor MPs thought it wasn’t tough enough.
Labor immigration minister Arthur Calwell told parliament in 1949: “We can have a white Australia, we can have a black Australia, but a mongrel Australia is impossible, and I shall not take the first steps to establish the precedents which will allow the floodgates to be opened.”
He was defending his decision to deport an Indonesian woman and her eight children.
Jack Lang, controversial NSW Labor Premier and mentor of Paul Keating, said the White Australia policy was Australia’s Magna Carta.
“The Australian Labor Party was actually brought together with White Australia as its primary objective,” he wrote in his autobiography.
There was no shortage of Labor politicians in the 1970s willing to stand up in opposition to Vietnamese boat people escaping the horrors of war.
In the 1990s a Western Australian Labor senator produced an anti-immigration newsletter that carried on its front page a cartoon of an airliner leaving Australia and returning to Asia filled with caricatures of asian faces beneath stereotypical straw hats.
Now Labor is lock step on reducing foreign working visas and undermining free trade agreements, both of which carry a bizarre undertone of classical Australian racism.
In the recently released ad by the CFMEU, a young man is told by his father that Tony Abbott is “letting Chinese companies bring in their own workers”.
The uncomfortable truth for inner-city Labor supporters is that net migration decreases under Labor governments (with the exception of the Hawke government).
It is the Liberal party that has traditionally supported immigration.
To lessen the ideological blow for Labor’s left factions, Shorten has promised to increase Australia’s humanitarian refugee intake and to pay the United Nations High Commission for Refugees $450 million to increase its capacity in South-East Asia.
But this is just window dressing.
It's hard to believe Labor won't be putting the brakes on immigration any chance it gets.