Gillard, Rinehart, and the Continuing Legacy of White Australia

Just as I finish my series of posts on ‘Race and the Making of the Australian Working Class’, we get a present-day example of what I was discussing. The federal government has decided to act as a recruitment agency for Big Mining, in particular the empire of Gina Rinehart (whose banana-republican vision of Australia’s future I dissed here), by importing 1700 foreign workers specifically to work in her mines. The decision shouldn’t surprise anyone – the Australian state has shaped the labour market to suit the needs of private employers ever since convicts were hired out.

The debate surrounding the issue has been framed in terms of ‘Australian’ workers being replaced by ‘foreign’ ones. However, as federal MP Kelvin Thomson (ALP – Vic.) pointed out on ABC News24 last week, the foreign workers are being brought in because Rinehart doesn’t wish to employ the indigenous workers who live close to the mines. In addition, the foreign workers are not the downtrodden and oppressed of the Earth, but likely to be educated people from the developed world, China, or India. The reserving of jobs for white people which would otherwise have gone to non-whites is nothing new in our history: just ask Chinese goldminers at Lambing Flat in 1861, Kanakas on the Queensland sugar fields in the 1900s, or Japanese pearlers in Broome in the 1910s.

The use of state power to regulate the supply of labour is essential to an understanding of Australia’s economic history. The battles over the availability of land for settlement, the transportation of convicts, and the immigration of non-whites are all intimately linked with the need of the state and of corporations for a plentiful supply of cheap labour, and with the desire of workers to create a tighter labour market. Indigenous Australians have been particularly targeted by this process ever since the movement of whites to the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes drew them into the pastoral economy. The Aborigines Protection Boards historically acted as recruiters and suppliers of indigenous labour, and the victims of the Stolen Generations were often made to work in missions or in private homes. Indigenous workers were denied the rights accorded to their white counterparts – hence the Stolen Wages phenomenon and the wave of indigenous-led strikes in the Pilbara and Northern Territory in the mid-twentieth century. During the colonial occupation of Papua New Guinea between the First World War and 1975, Australian mining companies were complicit in the use of indentured labour to staff their facilities. Mining giants such as Rio Tinto have a history of union-busting and conspiring to dispossess Aboriginal Australians of their land. The Gillard government’s decision to provide the mining industry with the workforce of its choice continues this ugly tradition.