As the U.S. is torn by wrangling over the proposed Gang Of Eight Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill Australia has just gone to the polls in a federal election and overthrown a government in a contest that was, most pundits agree, significantly decided by Australia's own problems with illegal immigrants.
Surrounded on all sides by a seemingly endless expanse of ocean, Australia doesn't suffer from the United States' issue of long, porous land borders. However, this does leave the Royal Australian Navy perpetually occupied in locating, intercepting and often rescuing flotillas of illegal people-smuggling boats. Such rescues often cost millions of dollars, cause considerable risk to the male (and female) sailors who perform them and task vital strategic assets away from their proper roles of securing Australia's maritime borders.
Under the former Liberal (= conservative) Prime Minister, John Howard, the arrival of illegal craft within Australian territorial waters was a rare occurrence. At one stage, only 2-3 craft could be expected within the space of a calendar year. Now, that many are routinely intercepted in as many days.
In 2007 federal election, the conservative party was ousted and replaced by the Australian Labour Party, a left/far-left coalition of unionists, intellectuals and greens (= Democrats).
The subsequent softening of immigration laws and processing procedures (compare the UK Labour Government under Tony Blair) immediately led to a staggering upsurge in illegal boat arrivals. It also had the tragically foreseeable consequence of causing a breathtaking increase in deaths, as the mostly unseaworthy craft made the perilous, shark-infested voyage through the Indian Ocean.
Illegal immigration was effectively targeted by the current Liberal leader, Tony Abbott. Saying “This is our country and we determine who comes here” and promising to "stop the boats," his campaign has resounded with an electorate tired after years of leftist empty promises, failed policies and intra-party drama. The best last-ditch efforts of the dying Main Stream Media to spin Abbott’s principled stand as “racism” were decidedly unsuccessful.
Where will this leave Australia in the longer term? The implosion of the Australian Labor Party has been so rancorous and this electoral defeat so decisive—worst in a hundred years—that it is entirely possible it will be banished to the wilderness for a decade or even longer. Illegal immigration could be returned to negligible figures and legal immigration may well be tightened. Abbott has also indicated that he would be willing to ease gun control laws, forge closer ties with traditional (i.e. Western) allies and lower taxes and business regulation.
For many in the U.S., the U.K., and mainland Europe, battered by waves of legal and illegal immigration, and with little relief in sight politically, Australia could begin to appear an attractive alternative. With favourable demographics (white 92%, Asian 7%, aboriginal and other 1%), a strong economy and an unemployment rate of 5.7%, Australia might yet become the last best option—a “Lifeboat Australia.”
Though things have yet to reach a crisis point in most of the Anglosphere (and hopefully never will do), for White South Africans, facing a very real genocide, Australia is already one of the favoured locations for relocation. In 2011/2012, more than 6,000 South Africans chose to relocate permanently to Australia, a figure only exceeded by a handful of other countries with far greater individual populations. (Relative to population, that’s equivalent to some 84,000 South Africans coming to the U.S. annually. Instead, there are only some 45,000 South African Americans in total).
The United Kingdom is the ancestral motherland for the greater percentage of Australians. Some 16,000 Brits chose to make Australia their new home in 2011/2012. These figures are rising every year, and are probably low indicators as to the true numbers of White people who wish to flee the lands of their forebears for a land (slightly) less lost to rampant diversity.
Needless to say, like everywhere else in the Anglosphere, Australia officially sees itself, despite its overwhelming White majority, as a “diverse” and “multicultural” country. And that is certainly true of the two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, both of which boast large migrant communities. However, outside these cities, there is blessedly little indication of multiculturalism, aside from scattered Aboriginal settlements in the extreme Outback.
As they have done in most western nations, non-White settlers in Australia have responded to the welcoming, tolerant, non-assimilationist attitudes of their new hosts by forming ethnic ghettos where they can be surrounded exclusively by their own kind. They have also—to a limited degree—imported their native conflicts, with Sunni and Shia Muslims in Sydney's West often exchanging gunfire. [Syria’s Civil War Spills Over in Sydney, By Debra Jopson, Global Mail, October 30, 2012]
But, although these groups are as overrepresented in the Australian MSM as they are prison populations, they still form a strikingly small fraction of Australia’s population. With the election of Tony Abbott, their overall numbers are perhaps unlikely to swell for at least the next generation.
Abbott has pledged to reverse the previous government's pledge to increase the number of visas granted to asylum seekers from 13,750 to 20,000—equivalent to nearly 300,000 in the U.S., as opposed to an actual total of 73,000 in 2010). Before the election, plans to reduce legal immigration may have been placed aside in the drive to secure vulnerable ALP seats in Sydney's immigrant-heavy West. But now the situation has changed. With his election mandate, Abbott now has considerable room to maneuver. Where he goes from here is really just a question of how ardently Abbott seeks meaningful patriotic immigration reform.
Naturally, that would mean going up against the well-entrenched elites in media, academia and the government departments themselves. But this election has revealed their power largely to be a matter of voice as opposed to true influence. The average Australian just voted for lowered immigration... in overwhelming numbers. As R. J. Stove has pointed out the time is ripening for a re-examination of long held left-dominated policy.
One area of legal immigration where Abbott will want to turn attention is the current legal immigrant intake from mainland China. As Drew Fraser correctly pointed out on VDARE.com in 2005, the combination of East Asian racial solidarity, innate intellectual advantage and workmanlike temperament will most certainly place competing Australians at an immediate disadvantage.
In Australia, there now exists a very real opportunity to undo the damage wrought by years of leftist misgovernance and begin to reverse the corrosive Cultural Marxism that has been eating into Australian cultural, academic and entertainment life.
All we need now is the help of a few more good Americans—and Brits, South Africans and Europeans.
Max Suebian [Email him] is a historian and writer based in Sydney, Australia.
