From Manning Clark’s History of Australia (Ed: Michael Cathcart, 1993) pp411-2
At polling time on 29 and 30 March 1901, Barton and the supporters of the middle way obtained a working majority, provided the members of the Labor Party voted with them. Labor was prepared to keep the Barton Government in power in return for concessions to the Labor platform. Labor’s main planks were declared to be: (1) White Australia; (2) adult suffrage; (3) old age pensions; (4) a citizen army; and (5) compulsory arbitration.
The aim of the Barton Government was to preserve the structure of society which existed in Australia. To ensure that, there was one principle from which they believed they should never make a concession: White Australia. That was to be the first principle by which the Commonwealth was to be administered and guided. The problem was how that was to be achieved. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, had informed the premiers of the colonies in 1897 that any exclusion or discrimination based on a distinction of race or colour conflicted with the principle of equality before the law of all members of the British Empire. The British Government was also anxious not to offend Japan, on whose friendship and support the British were relying to contain the Russians in the Far East. For this reason the Barton Government accepted the Suggestion that Australia should follow the precedent established in the province of Natal by applying the ‘dictation test’.
Deakin told members that the national manhood, the national] character, and the national future were at stake. Australians wanted to be one people, a united race inspired by the same ideas. Labor speakers stressed the threat of coloured labour to the workers’ standard of living. That nice chap Chris Watson declared that the real question was whether Australians would want their brothers or their sisters to be married to any of these people. King O’Malley, a picturesque mountebank from North America, wanted Australia for the white race. Hughes declared that the ‘leprous curse’ would make Australia a country no longer fit for the white man. Jim Page, a Labor member from Queensland, pictured the horrors of ‘plague leprosy’, of the ‘docile Hindoo’ and ‘full-blooded bucks’ from Bombay being let loose among white women.
Outside Parliament the radical press whipped up the hysteria. The Worker in Brisbane asked whether Queenslanders wanted their state to be known as ‘Mongrelia’ or ‘Kanakaland’, or ‘Leperland’, or as a ‘suburb of Asia’. Australian interests must not be sacrificed on the altar of Britain’s eastern policy. The Bulletin put it quite bluntly: white Anglo-Saxons could not intermarry with niggers without lowering the national type: the Anglo-Saxon must be preserved in his pure state if he was to retain position as ‘the best and strongest and most intellectual on this earth’. On 23 December 1901 Lord Hopetoun gave the royal assent to an Act to place certain restrictions on immigration. Among those who could be denied entry was any person who was unable to complete a dictation test in any European language, when asked to do so by an immigration officer. A tablet of the law of Australia had been cut.
Tgk1946's Blog 