Hamish McDonald (Sydney Morning Herald)
For most of their careers, Rudd and like-minded others in our Government and society have been working to reverse one of the great wrongs of Federation, the white Australia policy enforced in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, the first substantial law passed by the Commonwealth Parliament.Oh, so not only do we also have to say 'sorry' to the Islanders, but we do this by surrending our country to them as well. I see it now: for most of their careers, Hamish and like-minded others in our media and society have been working to reverse one of the great wrongs of Federation - Australia.
In Niue, Prime Minister Rudd is expected to start redressing the other big wrong of Federation, in the centenary year of its completion.
This was the deportation between 1904 and 1908 of 7078 “kanakas” working on the Queensland cane fields, the remnants of the mostly Melanesian indentured labour recruited in the dubious “blackbirding” trade...
Rudd will start the process of getting Pacific island workers back onto the farms, orchards and vineyards of Australia, if not the highly mechanised cane fields...
This is a region we can help - and help ourselves - only by a more open embrace, a wider involvement, and more people-to-people contact. This requires us to overcome our phobia and see the Pacific as a human resource, and an economic extension rather than a drag for Australia.
It’s a world that will get harder to shut out anyway. The solutions of the 1970s that seemed to get the region off our plate - independence, liberation thinking, foreign aid - are failing under the weight of population growth, urban drift, unemployment, crime, corruption, disease and climate change...
But we need a more layered view of where the Australian home stops, moving incrementally to a more regional approach where Pacific people can use the “main islands” of Australia and New Zealand to lift their lives, through seasonal labour, education and some settlement.
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