Watch this short (10 minute) film  featuring Calwell, "Tomorrow's Australians" (1949)

Labor’s post-war immigration minister drove the nation from a British colony to a multicultural society.

Arthur Calwell arguably had more impact on shaping modern Australia than any other politician. As immigration minister between 1945 and 1949, Calwell implemented and popularised the Chifley Labor government’s “populate or perish” policy, persuading the union movement that mass migration was necessary - a difficult task when 600,000 men and women were returning from war and the Depression was fresh in the memories of working people.

History has largely portrayed Calwell as a symbol of the White Australia Policy. His name is now most closely associated with his infamous pun that “two Wongs do not make a White” (not a racist witticism, as commonly believed, but a bad joke made in parliament about two men called Wong and an MP called White). However Lindsay Tanner, federal member for the seat of Melbourne, which Calwell held from 1940-72, has argued that Calwell was the man who made the end of White Australia possible. In a 2003 speech, he said: “Calwell pushed the boundaries of racial inclusion at a time when it was extremely politically risky to do so.”

Immediately after the war, Australian industry was growing rapidly and needed labour. Its traditional source, Britain, couldn’t supply enough new citizens to meet the government's goal of an annual population increase of 2%, half through natural increase and the other half through immigration. In 1947 Calwell signed an agreement with the United Nations Refugee Organisation to accept displaced persons from European refugee camps under a tied labour scheme, and in so doing interrupted the seamless connection between Australian and British culture. About 85,000 people arrived over the next two years.

The first wave of migrants came from northern Europe and had an Aryan or Caucasian look. Calwell wrote later that it wasn’t hard to sell immigration once photographs of “the beautiful Balts” were published. He coined the term New Australians, which he saw as non-derogatory, as part of his campaign to persuade a dubious Australian people of the need for large-scale, non-British immigration.

That said, Calwell had strong, and in today’s context, racist views on what kinds of immigrants Australia ought to accept. At the same time as he was overseeing the influx from Europe, he was refusing to allow Australian occupation troops in Japan to return with Japanese wives and deporting many Chinese, Indochinese, Filipino and Malayan wartime refugees.

It wasn’t a man’s skin colour, his culture or history that he objected to, he wrote in his autobiography, Be Just and Fear Not. “What is wrong with most coloured migrants is that they form hard-core, anti-white, ‘black power’ pressure groups in every country that accepts them.” Calwell led the Labor Party from 1960 and lost three federal elections before standing aside in 1967 for his charismatic deputy, Gough Whitlam.

- “Australia’s Influential Top 10“ , The Bulletin, 4 July 2006

In 1945, Calwell became Minister for Immigration in Ben Chifley’s post-war Labor government. Thus, he was the chief architect of Australia’s post-war immigration scheme at a time when many European refugees desired a better life far from their war-torn homelands, and he became famous for his relentless promotion of it. Calwell’s adovocacy of the program was crucial because of his links to the trade union movement, and his skillful presentation of the need for immigration. Calwell overcame resistance to mass immigration by promoting it under the slogan “populate or perish”. This due attention to the need, particularly in light of the recent war in the Pacific, to increase Australia’s industrial and military capabilities, though a massive increase in the population. In July 1947 he signed an agreement with the United Nations Refugee Organisation to accept displaced persons from European countries ravaged by war.

Calwell’s enthusiasm and drive in launching the migration program was a notable feature of the second term of the Chifley government, and has been named by many historians as his greatest achievement (especially given the labour movement's hostility to earlier migration programs).

- edited extract from Wikipedia entry on Calwell

“Conscription is immoral”: prophet of Vietnam

On the eve of the [1964] Senate campaign, the Vietnam War began to take shape as the dominant issue in Australian politics. In August 1964 the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which it was claimed that forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) had fired on American vessels in international waters, exposed the dilemma that was to dog the Labor Party throughout the war: how to condemn the United States’ intervention without condemning Australia’s ally, the United States. Calwell personified Labor’s dilemma and expressed it memorably in an emotion-laden speech at a parliamentary reception for President Lyndon Johnson in October 1966 in which he ended a philippic against the war by reciting the final sentences of the Gettysburg Address.

In April 1965 Menzies had announced the dispatch of an Australian battalion to the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) to help to stop the ‘downward thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans’. Calwell’s reply on 4 May proved prophetic as to the war’s course and outcome: the U.S.A. faced humiliation in what was essentially a civil war. He asked: ‘As the war drags on, who is to say that [Australia’s commitment of 800 regular troops] will not rise to 8000, and that these will not be drawn from our voteless, conscripted 20 year olds?’ It was only when Menzies’ successor Holt included conscripts in the expanding Australian contingent in 1966 that Calwell’s deepest emotions became fully engaged in opposition to Australia’s involvement.

- edited extract from the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Calwell by Graham Freudenberg

OPPOSITION LEADER ARTHUR CALWELL:  [O]n behalf of all my colleagues of Her Majesty’s Opposition, I say that we oppose the Government’s decision to send 800 men to fight in Vietnam. We oppose it firmly and completely …

We do not think it will help the fight against Communism. On the contrary, we believe it will harm that fight in the long term. We do not believe it will promote the welfare of the people of Vietnam. On the contrary, we believe it will prolong and deepen the suffering of that unhappy people so that Australia’s very name may become a term of reproach among them. We do not believe that it represents a wise or even intelligent response to the challenge of Chinese power … We of the Labor Party do not believe that this decision serves, or is consistent with, the immediate strategic interests of Australia. On the contrary, we believe that, by sending one quarter of our pitifully small effective military strength to distant Vietnam, this Government dangerously denudes Australia and its immediate strategic environs of effective defence power. Thus, for all these and other reasons, we believe we have no choice but to oppose this decision in the name of Australia and of Australia’s security.

I propose to show that the Government’s decision rests on three false assumptions: An erroneous view of the nature of the war in Vietnam; a failure to understand the nature of the Communist challenge; and a false notion as to the interests of America and her allies. No debate on the Government’s decision can proceed, or even begin, unless we make an attempt to understand the nature of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, this is the crux of the matter; for unless we understand the nature of the war, we cannot understand what Australia’s correct role in it should be ...

We are doing our duty as we see it. When the drums beat and the trumpets sound, the voice of reason and right can be heard in the land only with difficulty. But if we are to have the courage of our convictions, then we must do our best to make that voice heard ... generations to come will record with gratitude that when a reckless Government willfully endangered the security of this nation, the voice of the Australian Labor Party was heard, strong and clear, on the side of sanity and in the cause of humanity, and in the interest of Australia's security.

- Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 4 May 1965

Among Australian speeches, Arthur Calwell's 1965 speech in which he declared Labor's opposition to the war in Vietnam stands out. The speech, when I last read it, seemed to have something of the sinewy intelligence and courage that FDR's speech had. It is not eloquent for the sake of eloquence, but in proportion to the argument and the conviction that underlies it. Graham Freudenberg built it on a proposition, not a political convenience; that is why it is free of both cliche and condescension and the phrases still ring long after we have ceased to care about the subject. Speeches like this are rarely written nowadays because the political climate does not allow of much intellectual effort or, in general, politicians of much character. Perhaps they should bear in mind that while Labor lost the election that year it did help them grow a spine and eventually they won because of it.

- Don Watson, historian and speech writer, "Unforgettable Speeches" , ABC Radio National

The most important issue in this campaign is conscription, the conscription of a section of our 20 year old youths, against their wishes and their wills, to kill or be killed in the undeclared civil war in Vietnam and the threatened extension of conscription to all 20 year olds and other age groups to increase our unwarranted and unnecessary commitments. We can prevent all this happening by defeating the menace on next Saturday fortnight.

The Menzies Government made the first blunder over Vietnam nearly two years ago. It blundered equally badly over Suez in 1958. The Holt Government is determined to increase the extent of the Vietnam blunder. So unimpressed are our men of military age about the need to fight in the war in Vietnam that none of them will volunteer. No one can deny this fact; not even our own bellicose Prime Minister. The Government having failed to attract volunteers has resorted to conscription to maintain our army. It asks for your endorsement. I hope you will refuse it most emphatically.

Conscription is immoral, it is unjust and it is a violation of human rights. It must and will be defeated. There are 600,000 Australian mothers with sons between 15 and 20 years of age and many of these boys could be sent away to die or be wounded in the long cruel, dirty war that is raging in Vietnam. I call on those 600,000 mothers and their husbands and their other sons and daughters to tell Mr Holt that the lives of their eligible sons are too precious to be squandered by the man who has pledged this country to go all the way with LBJ. I doubt if any one of the Government’s Senators and Representatives who voted for conscription, and that includes the splinter group duo, has a son fighting in Vietnam. It is so easy therefore for all these anti-Labor Members of Parliament to regard the lives of other people’s children as expendable and to dispose of them in any way they think fit and without remorse or regret.

There is no difficulty in separating conscripts from members of the regular Army and so we will act in consultation with the American authorities, immediately we become the Government, to withdraw all conscripts in Vietnam. Our first act as a Government will be to abolish conscription and give orders that all conscripts in camp in Australia shall be discharged forthwith. The remainder of our troops will be brought home at the earliest practicable moment after consideration with our Allies and so as not to endanger the lives of any Australian or allied troops. While our troops are in Vietnam, we undertake to give them any support they might need. We will never let them down. As it is immoral to conscript our youths to die in Vietnam, so it will be immoral not to withdraw them when we become the Government. This we will do.

The Labor view on Vietnam are supported by opinions expressed by the late President J.F. Kennedy, and by other distinguished Americans like his two famous brothers, Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy and by Senators Fulbright and Mike Mansfield and 24 other outstanding Senators.

- Policy launch speech, St Kilda Town Hall, Melbourne, 10 November 1966

“Two Wongs don’t make a White”: an undeserved reputation

Calwell’s remark in Parliament in 1947 that “Two Wongs don't make a White” is widely quoted. The remark was intended as a joke, being a reference to a Chinese resident called Wong who was wrongly threatened with deportation, and a Liberal MP, Sir Thomas White. Today the remark is seen as evidence that Calwell was a racist.

Calwell later wrote: “It is important to me, at least, to set about the facts about [this] remark, which have been misrepresented so often it has become tiresome ... I said, among other things, that an error may have been made in the case of two men named Wong. I then said, and I quote from Hansard, 'There are many Wongs in the Chinese community, but I have to say - and I am sure that the Honourable Member for Balaclava [Thomas White] will not mind me doing so - that “two Wongs do not make a White”. It was a jocose remark, made partly at the expense of the member for Balaclava, Hon T.W. White. I expected that I would have been correctly reported, as I was in Hansard, and that the initial letter ‘W’ on both the names ‘Wong’ and ‘White’ would have been written in capitals. But [later] the name of White was deliberately altered into a definition of colour, so as to read ‘two Wongs don't make a white.’ ... There was never any intention in my mind to raise any question of colour.”

In his 1978 biography of Calwell, Colm Kiernan wrote: “Was Calwell a racist? All Australians who upheld the White Australia policy were racist in the sense that they upheld a policy which discriminated against coloured migrants ... Calwell never denied the discriminatory reality of the laws: ‘It is true that a measure of discrimination on racial grounds is exercised in the administration of our immigration policy.’ But he did not consider himself to be superior to any Asian. Calwell also said in Parliament: “I have no racial animosity.” Kiernan further says: “Calwell had many friends among the Chinese community in Melbourne. This would have been impossible if he had been prejudiced against them. Anthony Wang, the first Chinese councillor of the City of Melbourne, has acknowledged Calwell’s support and friendship. He liked the Chinese people so much that he learnt Mandarin in which language he could converse.”

Kiernan is correct to observe that until the 1950s virtually all Australians supported the White Australian policy, that Calwell's views were entirely within the political mainstream at that time, and Calwell believed himself to be free of personal prejudice against people of other races…

In fact Calwell did not refer in Parliament to two men called Wong. The full quotation is: “The [deportation] policy which I have just mentioned relates to evacuees who came to Australia during the war. This Chinese is said to have been here for twenty years, and obviously, therefore, is not a wartime evacuee. Speaking generally, I think there is some claim for him to be regarded as a resident of Australia, and I have no doubt his certificate can be extended from time to time as it has been extended in the past. An error may have been made in this case. The gentleman’s name is Wong. There are many Wongs in the Chinese community, but I have to say - and I am sure that the Honourable Member for Balaclava will not mind me doing so - that ‘two Wongs do not make a White’”. (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 2 December 1947)

…

Calwell’s attitude to indigenous Australians should also be considered. In his memoirs he wrote. “If any people are homeless in Australia today, it is the Aboriginals. They are the only non-European descended people to whom we owe any debt. Some day, I hope, we will do justice to them.”

- edited extract from Wikipedia entry on Calwell

Few Australian political leaders have influenced the shape of our modern society more. Few have received less credit from history for such a major contribution. The Australia that Arthur Calwell knew when he entered Parliament was a profoundly different place from the one we know now. In those days being anything but Anglo-Irish was a matter for curiosity and suspicion. Arthur Calwell had the heart and imagination to see the part Australia could play in relieving the suffering of millions of European refugees ... Arthur Calwell's immigration program truly shaped modern Australia. History has unfairly portrayed him as a symbol of the White Australia Policy. He should be remembered as the very person who made the end of White Australia possible.

Calwell pushed the boundaries of racial inclusion at a time when it was extremely politically risky to do so. He facilitated Lebanese immigration. He promoted citizenship rights for Chinese – Australians. He even spoke some Mandarin, and was revered by the Chinese community in Melbourne. In 1944 Calwell wrote to Ben Chifley about his dream 'to develop a heterogeneous society: a society where Irishness and Roman Catholicism would be as acceptable as Englishness and Protestantism, where an Italian background would be as acceptable as a Greek, a Dutch or any other'. Calwell's outstanding achievement is that he largely fulfilled this aim.

 - Lindsay Tanner, Labor MHR for Melbourne, Arthur Calwell Memorial Lecture, 19 September 2003

Working class hero: enduring relevance

‘Calwell’s warning’

In his 1972 memoir, Arthur Calwell warned the ALP of a ‘faction’ that had begun to assert itself in the party. Calwell, in arguably the most far-sighted observation on Australian politics, said the 'faction':

The story of the ALP from the mid-1960s onwards was one of the manner in which these aggressive, assertive, philosophical, way-out people were embraced by Gough Whitlam. And, in the aftermath of the electoral disaster of Paul Keating’s prime ministership, the question the ALP must now ask itself is implicit in Calwell's observation. It is this: do these aggressive, assertive, philosophical, way-out people promote the wellbeing of the Labor Party or of society?

Calwell’s book was reviewed by Neal Blewett, later a Minister in the Hawke government. To Blewett, Calwell was an ‘anti-intellectual’ with ‘scarcely a kind word for his successor Gough Whitlam’. Blewett said ‘the account ... reveals Calwell’s blindness to the need for change in organisation, style and policies’ of the ALP. Blewett would undoubtedly agree with Paul Kelly’s assessment that ‘Whitlam ... modernised [emphasis added] the Labor Party in the three domains ideology, structure and social composition. Under Whitlam . . . the supremacy of the parliament wing over the machine was achieved in practice, and Labor became a respectable party for the expanding middle classes.’ And he would agree, in part at least, with the succinct and lucid piece of political analysis by B. A. Santamaria, who wrote that to ‘modernise’ the party, Whitlam prepared a ‘carefully calculated strategy’ before succeeding to the leadership of the parliamentary ALP. Santamaria said:

The ALP hierarchy uses Whitlam’s ‘formula’ to this day, with two modifications. First, since the demise of communism, the ex-communist-based Left in the unions now associates itself with the middle class. Secondly, the early Hawke government heard Bill Hayden’s ‘message’ on competent economic management.  

...

Blewett read the passage in Calwell’s book quoted at the beginning, so it is surprising he should accuse Calwell of being ‘a politician moved not by ideas or ideology, but by personalities and personal style’. After all, the social base and ideology of the ALP that Calwell raised in 1972 have been amongst the most important political ideas that Australian academics and politicians have had to talk about in the past two and a half decades. One can only speculate as to whether Blewett lacks the foresight of Calwell, who he contemptuously called a ‘paleolaborite’ - an ancient or primitive Labor supporter - or whether, as one of the ‘largely better-educated and articulate new recruits’ whose ‘image of the good society … was shaped around [his] self-interest’, he was being coy. Whatever, Blewett was wrong to say that ‘[if the ALP] could survive Calwell it could survive anything’. The question confronting the ALP is this: can it survive Blewett and his ilk?

- edited extracts from Michael Thompson’s Labor without class: the gentrification of the ALP (Pluto Press, 1999), pages 1,2 and 95.

Both [Michael] Thompson and [Bob] Birrell wax lyrical about different things said by Arthur Calwell in his autobiography. I find their colonisation of Calwell thoroughly offensive. Calwell is one of my heroes. I actually knew Calwell and had some political dealings with him. I revere him for the following things that he did in his life:

Calwell was a complex, courageous and intelligent man, but he was a man of his place and time, with some of the religious and cultural prejudices that came from his background.

Predictably, Thompson and [Katherine] Betts celebrate only his most backward statements and attitudes, which suit their reactionary purposes. In my view, Calwell’s great contribution to the Australian labour movement and Australian life will endure after this petty colonisation of his legacy has been forgotten.

The area in which Calwell’s weaknesses were striking were his attitude to race and his moralistic attitude to questions like censorship and sexuality. In both these areas the absolutely fundamental cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s are irreversible. The vast majority of the people, whose origins are in the robust Irish Catholic layer of Australian society, who had their education in the 1960s and 1970s, have a totally different attitude now, on questions such as sexuality, censorship and race.

Like me, quite a few of those people respect Calwell’s contribution on the other matters, but they laugh in a slightly embarrassed and amused way about just those things that Thompson and Betts celebrate in Calwell, because as a social group, the Irish Catholic-identified section of the Australian population have painfully shed those prejudices -- rather more so, possibly, than Anglo-Australians.

We respect Calwell for his great contribution, but we understand him as a man of his place and time, and there’s not the slightest chance that his backward prejudices on some matters will strike any chord at all among the majority of those who come from the cultural background that he came from. It is really cynically eccentric for reactionary Anglos like Betts and Thompson to be hanging their hats on Calwell’s weaknesses. I revere Calwell, but he belongs to us, not to them!

- “Their Calwell and mine”, Bob Gould, Oz Left, 13 October 1999

contact: jmmuscat@netspace.net.au  [John Muscat]