‘Unsophisticated and unsuited’

Abstract

In the early 1900s, and in spite of the principles of the White Australia policy, Australia was forced to treat MÄori crossing the Tasman in largely the same way as PÄkehÄ New Zealanders. This served, first, to encourage New Zealand to federate and, second, to maintain healthy trans-Tasman diplomatic relations. However, extending uninhibited rights of entry to Pacific Island (and Asian) New Zealanders long remained a bridge too far for Australia. This was a cause of increasing tension with New Zealand, which had embraced closer ties with the Pacific and had, from the 1960s, allowed the immigration of thousands of Pacific Islanders. As late as 1971, the Australian cabinet agreed that Pacific Islanders were too ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘unsuited’ to settle freely in Australia. The election of the Whitlam government in 1972, though, led to the abandonment of this and other final vestiges of the White Australia policy. However, in the four decades since, Australia has progressively curtailed the rights of New Zealand migrants entering the country. There is good cause to believe that Australian dissatisfaction with New Zealand’s more liberal rules of entry for Pacific Island migrants is one of the reasons behind this.

• Discrimination
• immigration
• Pacific Islanders
• trans-Tasman relations
• White Australia

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Hamer

Author biography

Paul Hamer is a PhD student at Monash University in Melbourne and an Adjunct Research Associate at Te Kawa a MÄui, the School of MÄori Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He is an historian and has mainly worked for the Waitangi Tribunal in Wellington. He has authored several publications on the migration of MÄori to Australia, and his doctoral studies focus on MÄori inclusion and exclusion across the Tasman since 1793.