Introduction
The China Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) provides a
provision for the importation of Chinese labour. At the moment, there is some
dispute about what this will mean for Australian workers. The government
insists that the importation of Chinese labour for Chinese infrastructure
projects will not come at the expense of Australian workers. The Labor Party
and workers are not so sure. In his
press release Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb does not mention the
labour provisions.
In a summary of key outcomes, under the heading of “Business and skilled worker
mobility”, the government writes:
ChAFTA will support increased trade and investment between the
two countries by reducing barriers to labour mobility and improving temporary
entry access within the context of each country’s existing immigration and
employment frameworks and safeguards.
ChAFTA will provide improved access for a range of Australian
and Chinese skilled service providers, investors and business visitors,
supporting investment and providing business with greater certainty. Innovative
new Investment Facilitation Arrangements (IFAs), which will operate within the
framework of Australia’s existing visa system, will also provide greater
flexibilities for companies to respond to unique economic and labour market
challenges. IFAs will be available for large infrastructure projects above $150
million, strengthening investment in this key area and leading to the creation
of jobs and increased economic prosperity for all Australians.
The more detailed information provided in Fact Sheet:
Movement of Natural Persons outlines that Australians will also benefit from an
increased ability to work in China.
China will provide guaranteed access to Australian citizens and permanent residents for the following categories:
· Intra-corporate transferees for up to three years (including executives, managers and specialists);
· Contractual service suppliers, in certain sectors, for one year, or longer if stipulated under the relevant contract;
· Installers and maintainers for up to 180 days; and
· Business visitors for up to 180 days.
Australia will provide guaranteed access to Chinese citizens for the following categories:
· Intra-corporate transferees and independent executives for up to four years (including executives, managers and specialists);
· Contractual service suppliers for up to four years; including guaranteed access for up to a combined total of 1,800 per year in four occupations: Chinese chefs, WuShu martial arts coaches, Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners and Mandarin language tutors (subject to meeting standard immigration requirements);
· Installers and servicers for up to 3 months; and
· Business visitors for up to 90 days, or 6 months for business visitors who are service sellers.
The controversial section is listed under the heading “Investment
Facilitation Arrangements”:
Through a Memorandum
of Understanding allowing for Investment Facilitation Arrangements (IFA) Chinese
owned companies registered in Australia undertaking large infrastructure
development projects above $150 million will be able to negotiate, similarly to
Australian business, increased labour flexibilities for specific projects. This
will be done on a case-by-case basis under arrangements similar to the former
Enterprise Migration Agreements.
IFAs will provide flexibility
for companies to respond to the unique economic and labour market challenges
related to large infrastructure development projects. They reflect the Government’s focus on
strengthening infrastructure development and attracting investment, leading to
the creation of jobs and increased economic prosperity for all Australians.
IFAs will operate within the
framework of Australia’s existing 457 visa system and will not allow Australian
employment laws or wages and conditions to be undermined. The nationalities of eligible overseas
workers under IFAs will be non-discriminatory, consistent with Australia’s 457
visa system.
It is the argument
that IFAs “will not allow Australian employment laws or wages and conditions to be
undermined” that is likely
to be most disputed by opponents.
Such debates can be seen in historical context. Nineteenth
and early twentieth century debates about Chinese workers in Australia were
coloured by racist attitudes to non-White labour and immigration. The result of
this earlier debate was the White Australia Policy.
A major difference between the two periods is the level of
economic interconnection: little interaction in the earlier period, dominance in
the contemporary era. So the costs of the debate being couched in racist
terms today would be profoundly more severe in economic terms. Just as in the
immigration debate in general proponents of higher immigration need to counter
views that immigration and worker importation do not come at the expense of
Australians.
Australia should never move back to a discriminatory
immigration program. This post argues that opposition to the importation of
Chinese labour does not imply racism. It is possible to resist the importation
of Chinese labour within the context of restricting the importation of workers
from any country to cover employment opportunities that should be available to
Australians.
Some Historical Context
In the first half of the nineteenth century, some
Australians believed that the importation of large numbers of Chinese ‘coolies’
could solve the colonies’ endemic labour shortages. Early plans for Australia’s
settlement had canvassed the idea and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, important in the
establishment of the colony of South Australia, believed that coolie-labour
could turn “wilderness into gardens”.
Pastoralists, finding it difficult to
get workers to oversee their growing properties, also lobbied hard for cheap
labour. In the late 1870s, the South Australian government proposed to open up
the Northern Territory to comprehensive Japanese immigration after the failure
of small-scale efforts to attract Chinese and Afghani settlers. Stewart
outlines how Premier Blyth planned to transport “all classes of Japanese” – labourers, farmers and aristocrats – “and it
was declared again and again that their position was not to be that of the
Chinese coolies … they were to have their own lands … and were to enjoy all the
rights they had in their native land”.
Despite considerable planning and negotiation, nothing ever came of the scheme,
and given the level of popular hostility to Asians, it is not surprising that
the scheme failed to attract the support of the public.
The arrival of significant numbers of Chinese, as indentured
labourers after 1848 and as prospectors on the goldfields after 1851, caused
increasing friction with Anglo-Celtic miners. By the late 1850s, there were 42,000
Chinese in Victoria alone.
Their success in ‘tailing’ – the practice of sifting discarded and neglected
diggings – led to riots and persecution. Despite all this, a small but growing China
trade served Chinese immigrants and European settlers became keen buyers of
Chinese goods. Melbourne became an important centre in the tea trade and tea
and sugar accounted for a growing trade deficit with Asia.
Anti-Chinese sentiment flared again in the 1870s with new
gold discoveries in Queensland. At this time, one in seven settlers in
Queensland was Chinese.
Determined to put a halt to the influx of Chinese immigrants, by the late 1880s
all Australian colonies had banned Chinese immigration. There was to be no
Chinese influx into the Western Australian gold boom at the turn of the
century. Concerns about Japanese immigration also rose as Japan opened up to
the world in the late nineteenth century.
There was also significant opposition to the use of South Pacific labour in
Queensland’s cane fields and the colony’s eventual decision to join the Federation
was predicated on the acceptance of tariffs to protect the sugar industry in
the absence of cheap Pacific and Asian labour.
White Australia’s increasingly hostile attitude to Asia and
Asian immigration in the latter part of the nineteenth century restricted the
growth of trade, as did the preference for British goods, such as British grown
tea from India and Ceylon. By 1890, despite a period of considerable boom in
the colonial economies, Asia’s share of exports was only 1.6 per cent of the
total.
Some argued that buying from Asia was unpatriotic. Newspapers criticised
housewives for buying cheap Chinese goods. As one mocked at the time, “the
teapot will substitute the decanter … it will be green tea and there will be
neither milk nor sugar but we shall drink it with a smile on our faces”.
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 – the White Australia
Policy’s (WAP) official title – was the first major piece of legislation passed
by the newly federated Australian Parliament.
Hostility to Asia pervaded all levels of Australian society. Australia’s first
Prime Minister, Edmund Barton proclaimed in Parliament:
I do not think that the doctrine of the equality of man was
really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality.
There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races
… unequal and inferior.
British concern about the WAP’s direct banning of non-white
immigration and Japanese sensitivities to such overtly racist exclusion led the
Australian Government to introduce a dictation test, which could be conducted
in any European language: failure to pass the test led to exclusion.
Alongside official instructions was a secret provision on how officials should
conduct the test:
All aboriginal inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Polynesia should
be subjected to the test ... In the case of White Races, the test will be
applied only under special circumstances … If in your opinion the immigrant
would, for reasons which you would be prepared to state, be an undesirable
immigrant, it may be better to substitute for the English test a passage from
some other language.
The WAP had widespread support and it was enshrined in the
Federal Labor Party Programme of 1905. Workers saw cheap non-white labour as a
threat to their level of wages and unions acted to restrict the supply of
labour in particular trades and to use labour shortages to maintain wages and
conditions.
Workers had established the principle of labour restriction in the interests of
higher wages early on in Australia’s development. Blainey argues that
nineteenth century colonial parliaments, influenced by newly enfranchised men,
stopped the subsidisation of immigration passages to Australia through colonial
land sales to keep wages high.
Even earlier, free settlers and ex-convicts had complained about the impact of
convict labour on wages and conditions. The WAP, however, went beyond a concern
for wages into a belief system encompassing both fear and racism. Asia-anxiety
produced a contradiction in Australian society between workers’ aims to
restrict the supply of labour and the perception that Australia needed a larger
population to reduce its vulnerability.
On return to Australia Hughes pronounced to the Australian
population:
The White Australia is yours. You may do with it what you
please, but at any rate, the soldiers have achieved the victory and my colleagues
and I have brought that great principle back to you from the conference, as
safe as it was on the day when it was first adopted.
World War I enhanced the appeal of the WAP. In 1919, the
Prime Minister, William Morris Hughes, hailed it as “the greatest thing we have
achieved”. Hancock’s Australia, published
in 1930, argued:
The policy of White Australia is the indispensable condition of
every other Australian policy. Embodied in the Immigration Restriction Act,
1901-1925, its intention and significance are exceedingly easy to understand
once they have been freed from the rhetoric and special pleading in which they
have been enveloped. During the debates of 1901, the rhetoricians declared that
it would be unfair for a ‘nation of yesterday’ (China) to interfere with the
‘noblest race upon this sphere’ (the Australians). They even doubted whether
some European nations, such as the Italians, were ‘civilised in the ordinary
Australian sense’. However, their immediate concern was with black men and
yellow men.
During World War II, Japanese aggression reinforced
Australians’ anxieties about their location in the Asian region. After the war,
the victory of the communists in China in 1949 combined an old fear – Asia – with
a new one – communism. The most populous country in the world had joined forces
with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in a burgeoning communist sphere of
influence vehemently opposed to the capitalist West. Labor Immigration Minister
Arthur Calwell utilised an earlier slogan, “populate or perish” and proclaimed
that Australia had “twenty-five years at most to populate this country before
the yellow races are down on us”.
This tied in with arguments about post-war economic development and, once again,
policy-makers made connections between industry protection and population
growth.
Yet despite the perceived desperate need for a larger
population, Australia’s Anglo-Celtic policy-makers continued to discriminate
against non-white immigrants. Post-war immigration, however, continued to take
place under the rubric of White Australia, officially defined by the phrase:
“In pursuance of the established policy, the general practice is not to permit
Asiatics or other coloured persons to enter Australia for the purpose of
settling permanently.”
Nevertheless, Anglo preferences were relaxed and large numbers of Southern and
Eastern Europeans were amongst the million-plus migrants who came to Australia between
1945 and 1959. The most intense period of migration was between 1947 and 1951
when Australia received a net inflow of just fewer than half a million people.
There had been some minor concessions to Asian immigration
in 1949 when Australia allowed the entry of non-European refugees and Japanese
war brides but the first major breakdown of the WAP occurred in 1957 when Australia
allowed non-Europeans who had been living in Australia for 15 years to stay in
Australia. The following year the government abolished the dictation test. In
1961, the new editor of the Bulletin
– Donald Horne – removed the slogan “Australia for the White Man” from its
masthead: the slogan had graced the front cover since 1905.
After replacing Menzies, Harold Holt removed discriminatory
elements of Australian immigration law and between 1966 and 1971 non-European
migration increased from 746 a year to 2696. Although the Whitlam Government
reduced overall immigration as a response to the economic downturn, it
legislated to enable all migrants to become citizens after three years and instructed
all overseas immigration posts to disregard race as a criterion for settlement.
The Fraser Government removed all vestiges of the policy from the statute books
and allowed the entry of a large number of Vietnamese refugees.
This influx of Vietnamese was the first significant migration of Asians to
Australia since the nineteenth century.
Contemporary Migration
Since the mid-1980s Asia has usurped Europe as the largest
regional source of migrants. Asian immigration went from 3 per cent of the
total in the early 1960s to 7 per cent in the late 1960s to an average of 33
per cent from 1975 to 1985. By 1997-98, migration from Asia was slightly over
40 per cent and, for 2007-08, it was 42.2 per cent of the total intake. South
Asian migration, particularly from India, has also become increasingly
important in recent years.
In 2012-13 India (40,051) was the largest source of migrants followed by China (27,334)
and the United Kingdom (21,711).
According to the Department of Immigration and Border
Protection:
In 2012–13, the Migration Programme delivered 190 000 places.
Of these, 128 973 places went to Skill Stream migrants, and 60 185 places went
to Family Stream applicants. The remaining 842 places were for Special
Eligibility. The Skill Stream has been the main provider of new migrants to
Australia since 1997–98, delivering 67.9 per cent of total Migration Programme places
in 2012-13.
The Humanitarian program accounted for 20,019 visas an increase
on the 13 749 visas granted in 2011-12.
These are permanent migration statistics and the current
issue is more about temporary entry. In other words, the concerns are not about
the overall immigration intake, but about the short-term importation of labour
through devices like 457 Visa. As the figures below make clear there are already
substantial amounts of imported labour in Australia both directly through
skilled visas and indirectly through holiday work schemes and students.
The provisions in ChAFTA provide for a marked increase in
the importation of labour. The most important question is whether importing
Chinese labour will mean fewer benefits for Australians resulting from Chinese investment
in this country. As Van Onselen points out:
What’s good for China
is not necessarily good for Australia. And allowing the wholesale importation
of Chinese workers to build construction projects would be a disaster for the
local jobs market, which is already experiencing the highest unemployment in
more than a decade, youth underutilisation at 30%, and is facing further
serious retrenchment as the once-in-a-century mining investment boom unwinds
and the local automotive assembly industry shutters. Seriously, without local
labour force participation in construction projects, where is the benefit for
Australians? Once completed, these projects will employ very few people. They
will also be foreign owned, so the profits will largely flow offshore. And
without an adequate capture of resource rents, Australia’s natural
resource endowment will be diminished for little gain by the resident
population.
From a Chinese perspective, Li Ruogu, the chairman and
president of the Export-Import Bank of China, argued:
We know it is very difficult,
but if Australia can give permission for Chinese labourers to help with
infrastructure construction, then the mines and other projects we both need
will be completed quickly, and the workers will go back to China. They won’t
remain in Australia. Then Australia will employ local people to work in those
mines and other infrastructure. That will be good for employment, and therefore
beneficial for Australia.
Australians have a right to be sceptical about the potential
benefits for them of the importation of Chinese labour. The Significant
Investor Visa Program may also add to negative perceptions about Chinese immigration,
especially when mixed with anecdotal evidence of legal and illegal Chinese
investment in Australian property.
According to a recent report, the scheme “has reaped a total $1.7 billion”, awarding 343
residency visas as at the end July 31. The Abbott government accelerated the scheme after
concerns that the program begun in 2012 was not attracting investors.
Accordingly “six hundred and two additional applications had been made at July
31, and $3.05 billion in investment pledged in return”.
Conclusion
The government will need to handle the issue of worker importation
skilfully if it is to avoid echoes of Australia’s racist past. Opponents too will
need to be careful that their criticisms are not racist, singling out Chinese
workers. Critics need to treat the importation of Chinese labour no differently
than the importation of labour from any other country. Opposition to the scheme
should avoid demonising Chinese investment.
Nevertheless, Australian workers and their representatives
will take umbrage if the importation of Chinese workers is seen to undermine
the employment of Australians. Schemes like this are an easy solution for
investors and governments to solve labour shortages, rather than undertake the
hard work of developing skills and providing incentives for labour mobility.
