Special Assignment

27th September 1998

Welcome to White Australia

The shame in telling this story is not just that it is happening now, in a modern democratic state like Australia, but that there are those who are too, what? beleaguered? ignorant? indifferent? to really know or care.

Perhaps at another time, in a less pinched and poisonous moment in our history, we could be assured that in describing the woeful state of these people's lives, there would be a wave of sympathy or, at the very least, a commotion of sorts.

Troubl is, the very mention of the word ''migrant'' is enough to make the hearts of some freeze over. In the land of the migrant, the migrant is again on the nose. Mention that there are skilled, intelligent, hard-working, once-buoyant men and women and their children - people who were effectively invited to this country - now starving and destitute, in some cases wandering the streets, and in the mind's eye you can almost see a nation shrinking away.

Why? Because the migrant's story is not a cause celebre in the midst of massive economic restructuring, unemployment, rural debt, youth suicide, homelessness, family breakdown and, of course, the rise of One Nation.

People who are hurting often prefer the scapegoat to the truth, and who better to kick than the guy with the strange accent and the unpronounceable name? That's one reason the Haque family packed their bags and left Australia earlier this year, three months after arriving in their new home.

Azar Haque (not his real name) had been a successful architect and his wife, Sabera, an accountant before they touched Australian soil with their four children in October 1997. The family had lived in Pakistan as refugees since 1979 after fleeing their native Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion.

On the strength of their professional qualifications and English skills, and after passing a strict points test, Australia accepted them as independent, skilled migrants, members of the most valued category in the country's immigration programme.

Within weeks of arriving, they knew they were in serious trouble. The $2,000 they had entered the country with was fast dwindling. On the available evidence, it appears the Australian High Commission in Islamabad never warned them that this amount - large by Pakistani standards - was insufficient for a family in Australia for anything other than the short term. Nor did any Australian official tell them about the difficulty in obtaining jobs or, crucially, the two-year waiting period for income support for new arrivals.

Suddenly, they found themselves without a place to live, with no form of social security, no jobs and not even transport concessions to look for work. They applied for public housing, but were ruled ineligible because they didn't have a source of income. They then tried to get an affordable two-bedroom unit, but were refused by real-estate agents on the grounds that there were too many people seeking too few rooms.

"It was a disastrous situation,'' says the community advocate who worked on the case and who requested anonymity. "The family had to split up. They began living off donations from friends and charities like the Salvation Army.

The husband went to live with one friend, two of the children went to live with another and the wife and other two children went to a third place.

Because of this, the husband sank into deep depression. He couldn't sleep and lost his whole sense of self-worth. He said, "I can't even create a home where I can live with my children.''

By January this year, the Haques were so shattered by their experience, they pawned a set of traditional ornaments they'd been keeping for their daughters' weddings, bought six airline tickets and returned to the Indian subcontinent. They felt they could survive better in third-world Pakistan than in first-world Australia.

This has been an almost silent revolution. No grand, prime-time statements about an overhaul in immigration policy; no public pronouncements that the welcome mat was being removed. Rather, a series of quiet and ruthless measures carried out by the Department of Social Security (DSS) in the context of government budget cutbacks and a rethink on immigration policy.

It began in the early 1990s when the department identified an estimated $600 million that could purportedly be saved by withholding unemployment benefits to mainly newly arrived migrants. In 1993, the Keating Government responded to this assessment by imposing a six-month waiting period on a number of social security benefits for new arrivals.

Four years later, the Howard Government went much further. On March 4, 1997 the Government fulfilled an election promise by extending this waiting period to two years. They also extended the range of benefits to be withheld. This meant that, with the exception of those who'd entered Australia under the humanitarian or refugee programme, all new migrants were ineligible for two years for income support, including, crucially, the Special Benefit.

Until then, the Special Benefit had been regarded as the final safety act in Australia's social security system, the payment of ''last resort'' to someone in desperate straits.

Under the Keating changes, the Special Benefit had still been available to someone who could prove he or she was destitute. Now, under the new legislation, new arrivals could only draw this ''last resort'' payment if they could show they'd suffered a ''substantial change of circumstances beyond their control''.

Immigration is one of the most fraught and complex issues today in Australian public life. It is the hard political reality that both defines and divides us; the rock upon which we are built and the rock upon which some believe we might yet founder.

In its broadest sense, it embraces everything - our land, our history, our politics, our prejudices, our myths, our sense of ourselves. It pits old, white Australia against new, culturally diverse Australia, the bush against the city, the socially ignored against the socially mobile, the fearful against the welcoming. It challenges us at every level, from the environmental, economic and political to the social, cultural and moral.

For a nation of migrants, it has to be said that there has always been a remarkable ambivalence about those who've migrated here, even though only one in 100 Australians could have ever laid claim to local ancestry before 1788.

The migrant was always the tyke, reffo, wog, dago, Eytie, yid, Chink or slope long before he or she was ever one of "us". Part of the reason for this was natural irreverence, embarrassment, fear or just plain begotry towards foreigners. Part of it was also that deep in the national psyche was lodged the core myth that we were essentially superior, white, homogeneous, English speaking, intellectually British country.

To that end, we passed an anti-Chinese Immigration Act, issued dictation tests (a device used to exclude non-European migrants), expelled Kanakas from the sugar plantations (having press ganged them here in the first place) and, in 1901, united around the Immigration Restriction Act, the legislative foundation of the White Australia Policy. (The policy survived until formally abolished by the Whitlam Government in 1973.)

It is the reason Jock Collins, associate professor of economics at the University of Technology, Sydney, describes the Australian immigration story as one "inextricably linked with racist laws and practices".

The basis of Australian immigration for more than 100 years, he wrote in his book Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia's Post-war Immigration, was "White Australia".

But the White Australia policy also produced a kind of paradox. It allowed us, for example, to refuse entry to Filipinos for two decades after 1945 - a policy that earned us unfavourable comparisons with Nazi Germany at the United Nations - while at the same time allowing us to turn Turks into "honorary Europeans" so as to meet Australia's need for labour.

The problem was that, despite the inducements of the "£10 ticket", there were not enough British migrants. Australia was reluctantly forced to cast the net wider, initially towards Eastern Europe and the camps full of mainly Baltic refugees, but then in subsequent decades to northern Europe, southern Europe and the Middle East.

The result, as Jock Collins puts it, was that "A policy which had initally been planned to continue a homogeneous and racially pure society by default ended up producing one of the most ethnically diverse of all immigration programmes, with migrants from over 100 nationalities and ethnic groups making the long journey to Australia".

There is, of course, another side to the immigration story that does Australia proud. It is a photo album filled with images of herosim, ingenuity, resilience and tolerance. If you thumb through the pages, you will see pictures of old suitcases in new canefields, chinese laundries and restaurants, Greek milkbars, Vietnamese bakeries, Croatian vineyards, Jewish delicatessens, Italian corner shops, Ghanaian musical bands, Lebanese mosques, Sikh banana plantations, Indian temples and citizenship ceremonies in their thousands.

In 1995, Jock Collins co-authored a book called A Shop Full of Dreams about ethnic small businesses in Australia. It showed that one quarter of our small businesses were non-English speaking and that their contribution to the nation's wealth and job creation has been enormous. "A lot of these ethnic businesses were creating employment and 20 per cent of them were engaged in international trade," he says. "They were responsible for current account deficit reduction."

"All the opinion polls (of the 50s and 60s) said that we didn't want to become Italianised, Greekised or Eureopeanised," says Collins. "If the government had followed public opinion, we'd still be an Anglo Saxon country."

What emerged, instead, was a bipartisan policy on immigration which initially discriminated in favour of Europeans and then, from 1973 onwards, removed all vestiges of White Australia. It was to be a policy based on "the avoidance of discrimination on any grounds of colour of skin or nationality".

That policy led in 1986-87 to Asia (including the Middle East) becoming, for the first time since the gold rush, the largest source of migration to Australia - with 36 per cent of new settlers. If maintained, that will see the number of Asian born men and women comprising about 7 per cent of the population by the year 2025.

To see how far a man can fall, you could do worse than visit the "home" of Tilan Perera, two floors up a smog-stained, twin-tower block overlooking Sydney's Grate Western Highway. The scene is one of grinding poverty: a donated mattress, wardrobe, table and chairs from the Salvation Army; a near-empty fridge and a six-pack of Coca-Cola which the host has bought in honour of his visitor.

Perera arrived in Australia from Sri Lanka with his wife at the beginning of this year, armed with a post-graduate degree from the US, fluency in English, a previous successful job in Europe with an economic think-tank, impeccable qualifications as a former senior economics researcher and, finally, a boundless desire to succeed.

In Sri Lanka, Perera had been more than modestly comfortable. He owned his own house and a car. He held down an influential position in the higher reaches of the bureaucracy. He was a member of the elite - distinguished, respected, highly informed and, compared with many of his countrymen and women, and well paid. But he was intellectually dissatisfied and hungry for new opportunities. He was, in short, someone who might have been regarded as the ideal migrant.

He'd considered migrating to New Zealand, America or Germany, but chose Australia on the basis of his many dealings with key Australian officials in Sri Lanka. "I felt this was a country with a lot of tolerance and acceptance and support for a skilled migrant starting up a new life," he says.

Perera applied to migrate in 1995. The application fee cost him the equivalent of eight months' wages for an unskilled Sri Lankan worker. By the time he'd paid for medical examinations for himself and his wife, he'd spent the equivalent of $5,000 - nearly half his life's savings. He arrived in the country with $4,000 - an amount he thought ample for the brief period he would be looking for work.

Perera admits now he should have sought clarification on the letter he received from the Australian High Commission in Colombo informing him that he'd been accepted as an independent skilled migrant, but alerting him to the legislative changes that had been put in place since March 1997.

"It was all technical jargon and very alien to me," he says. "It said some things were available in certain circumstances and other things weren't. I should have thought about this more but we were excited about being accepted".

What was uppermost in Perera's mind was that Australia had a history of migration from Sri Lanka; it was a country now offering him a place to live and, judging by the job vacancies advertised in The Sydney Morning Herald (copies of which he'd obtained in Colombo), he would have no trouble finding work.

What followed is now a familiar scenario. Between the two of them, Perera and his wife applied unsuccessfully for hundreds of jobs (His wife had worked in Sri Lanka as a bookkeeper). The elderly Sri Lankan couple they'd been staying with asked them to leave the house. The money began to run out.

Tilan Perera begins to cry as he recounts what happened next. "It is very difficult talking about this," he says. "If anyone thinks people like me want to go to social security, they are wrong. The majority of us don't want to demean ourselves.

"But we began to have very limited money. A lot of the people whom I thought could help were not in a position to help. Some friends even started to avoid us, people who used to respect me in Sri Lanka. We gradually became more insular and this was very badly reflected on the wife. She started getting depressed and developing a heart condition and high blood pressure. I dragged her here. We had a much better life in Sri Lanka. We were never like this. Never dependent on charities."

By the time Perera and his wife came to the Welfare Rights Centre in Sydney, it had been three months since their arrival here. They were down to their last $200, both "half-starved" and terrified. Much to his embarrassment, Perera applied for a Special Benefit, but was denied on the basis that he had not suffered a "substantial change in circumstances".

Their situation horrified Linda Forbes, of the centre. "It was awful that a person with so much to offer Australia could be reduced to this," she says. "If he'd been given some assistance to settle soon after arrival, they wouldn't have reached those depths. But to force people into a situation where they are so absolutely desperate is just so counterproductive.

"No matter how talented and enthusiastic a person is when coming to Australia, there is no way that, when facing all this material and emotional hardship and distress, he can then apply himself to getting work."

Multiculturalism, that much reviled and misunderstood term, was conceived in many repects as a policy designed to help people like Tilan Perera. It was an attempt to address past wrongs, to include non-English-speaking migrants in a culturally pluralistic society, to prevent them becoming "non-people".

Indeed it was the Fraser Government in which John Howard was treasurer that, through its landmark Galbally Report in 1978, advanced a wide-ranging affirmative-action package of programmes and services. This acknowledged not only that migrants had special needs, but that Australia's social cohesion was enhanced by helping them settle.

It is clear now, according to Professor Jock Collins and others, that this policy has been ditched. "It is phenomenal that after five decades of immigration, we are throwing out the idea of equality for all," Collins says. "The most difficult years of settlement are the first two years. It's the time of greatest need and yet this is the time the Government pulls the rug out. It's a very shortsighted view of the economic contribution these people will make, but it is also a very black-hearted move that shows no compassion or understanding of the migration process."

Since coming to office in 1996, the Howard Government has responded to perceived community concern about immigration. Recently, it banned skilled migrants over the age of 45 from coming to the country. It has also tackled the problem of fraudulent marriages of convenience and radically reformed the family reunion component - limiting access to welfare benefits for recently arrived family members and imposing tougher restrictions on eligibility.

This year, Australia will allow 30,500 family members into the country, 26,000 fewer than the corresponding period three years ago. By contrast, 35,000 skilled migrants have been given the green light to migrate, 11,000 more than in 1995-96. These are the people Australia says it want most.

How we treat them is, therefore, a mark of our decency. By all means, according to the Democrats' Senator Andrew Bartlett, let's have an immigration debate. Let's look at the carrying capacity of the land, the needs of the labour market, the fact that our fertility rate is declining and our population ageing; or look at whether environmental damage is more about population size or the way we live.

Let's develop, as Stephen FitzGerald insists we should, a long-term population policy where we discuss the role of immigration and a migrant's obligations to this country.

Postscript: Tilan Perera has now got a job working as an economics researcher while his wife, Marguerite, has managed to secure a low-paid menial job.

They no longer depend on food vouchers and help from charities, but they remain emotionally scarred by their experience.

Marguerite has stopped staring at the wall for hours on end, but is still seeing a doctor for depression. Tilan Perera believes they might have turned the corner. He just can't understand why Australia accepted them - and then, in their hour of need, turned its back.

Good-Weekend

Editorial/Opinion Contents