RACIALISM STIRS IN

Electioneering in Australia has been a notoriously nasty business over the past 25 years while the ruling Liberal (Tory) Party has held office.

This election year is proving to be no exception to the rule.

William McMahon, the Prime Minister, was skilled in red-baiting under Sir Robert Menzies and then under Harold Holl nis techniques. He has followed President Nixon's suit in whipping up law and order and his ministers have recently taken to the theme of racialism.

There is no issue more deeply embedded in the Australian psyche than immigration. All coloured immigration was banned at the turn of the century under the notorious White Australia Act. But in 1966 the regulations were loosened to permit a trickle or skilled, professional Asians to enter the Great White Land.

But having made these minute concessions to the Japanese and Chinese industrialists to the north (they wanted the rules relaxed so they could bring in their own trained executives), the government is now cutting back on all immigration regardless of colour.

This is being done, it is argued, to halt the growing unemployment which wasting the shores of Australia for the first time for more than a decade. Rut ushila alanina dha 2mmm ala- DUL we uvor, ine Liberals are beginning a campaign to paint the Labour Party as the party of mass immigration.

It is reminiscent of the Tory campaign in Birmingham in 1964 when street slogans went saying: 'Vote Labour for a nigger neighbour.' And just as the Labourites reacted completely without principle in this country, so they are reacting in Australia.

The ludicrous situation has been reached where both Liberal and Labour politicians are mounting huge press campaigns to announce to the electorate that they totally oppose immigration, particularly if it's Top: present Labour Party leader, coloured. Everyone, in eftect, is Gough Whitlam and below: Prime claiming to be a racialist to win Minister McMahon of the Liberal votes. Party.

The most outspoken defender of Australian racial 'purity'-it has been worked out there are something_ like 45 nationalities, including Eskimos, in Australia— is Arthur Calwell, former leader of the Labour Party and an Immigration Minister in the Chifley government at the end of the war.

Calwell has called for a stop to the 'flood of Anglo-Indians, Anglo - Burmese, Dutch - burgers and Mauritians pouring into 'A multi-racial society is a polyglot nation and what redblooded Australian wants to see that happen?' Pod Australia and warned that 'the black tragedy of the United States must not be repeated here.

Calwell's racialist views are not new. When he was Immigration Minister between 1945 and 1949 he deported a man named Wong who had illegally arrived in Australia to live with his brother who was a naturalized Australian.

A big press campaign was mounted asking the minister to reconsider his decision on humanitarian grounds.

Calwell's reply was that the younger brother must be ejected from Australia. After all, he said, 'two Wongs don't make a white'