sant anti-migration spin on it.
Sydney is a very significant city. It has been in the forefront of Australian economic development since the early years of the 20th century. It is now, in fact, Australia's economic and financial capital, and it is the city in Australasia that is most locked into global financial markets and to trade in the region.
It is Australia's global city, and has a similar role to New York, Shanghai, Bombay or London in the US, China, India or Britain. It is at the bottom end in Australia for unemployment and the top end for job creation. It has always had a distinct ethnic and cultural mix. p> In the 19th century, Sydney and NSW were widely noted for having the highest proportion of Irish Catholics in the country. For the past 15 years Sydney has been the favoured point of entry for the spectacular wave of Asian migration, and about half the Asians who come to Australia have Sydney as their first preference.
Sydney and NSW have historically had by far the longest period of state Labor governments in Australia. The Labor Party started here in 1891. The defeat of the conscription referendum in 1916 was a product of the size of the Catholic population in NSW and the strength of the labour movement in this state.
NSW was also the site of the greatest ever popular mobilisation of the labour movement against the ruling class during the Lang period in the 1930s. At this moment we have a state Labor government almost as firmly entrenched as two earlier governments, the one led by McKell and the one led by Wran. The present electorally very successful Premier in this Labor government looks like Pinocchio, can't drive a car (like myself), is well known for his literary and historical interests, and is married to a confident Asian migrant, a businesswoman, Helena. He has just been re-elected as Premier in one of the biggest electoral swings in recent history.
Sydney is full of the bustle and activity that so pained one of the literary anti-migrationists. Sydneysiders rather like this bustle and activity, because it means jobs and incomes.
Sydney does have plenty of problems. There is increasing inequality. Housing prices are much higher than elsewhere, which is good for those who own a house, but bad for those who are starting out. Taken as a whole, however, the problems of Sydney are not insoluble and they are not made worse by migration.
Migration actually produces an economic prosperity that lays a basis for the solution of many of these problems. Even the poorest cohort in Sydney, people who live in the Western suburbs, have increased economic opportunities because of the nature of Sydney. The Victorian academics who use Sydney as a shock-horror example of the consequences of migration, are at a considerable loss for an explanation for this basic conundrum. If Sydney is so bad, why is it the favoured point of settlement for about half the people who wish to migrate to Australia?
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Their Arthur Calwell and mine
Both Thompson and 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:
В· His opposition to conscription and support for Irish independence during the First World War, which earned him a military intelligence file.
В· His opposition, from within a Labor cabinet, to conscription during the Second World War.
В· His decisive role in starting mass migration from non-British sources in 1946, which included helping Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and pushing aside the rabid Melbourne establishment anti-Semitism of the time.
В· His solid support for the Labor side against the Groupers during the Split.
В· His courageous and far-sighted opposition to the Vietnam War and conscription, which was the context in which I had dealings with him. He was quite willing to speak for our hard-nosed and militant Sydney Vietnam Action Committee, despite the fact that we were denounced by many of the "official Left" as splitting Trotskyists.
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 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. p> The area in which Calwell's weaknesses were striking were his attitude to race and his moralistic attitude to questions like censorship...
