Geoffrey Blainey: Quotes about people

“Democracy is not like a long-term loan of property to be entrusted by the people to the government and its small group of advisors. And yet in recent years a small group of people has successfully snatched immigration policy from the public arena, and has even placed a taboo on the discussion of vital aspects of immigration.”

“The ethnic composition of the population - and the particular mixture of nationalities, languages and cultures - is a matter of importance to all nations. The selection of immigrants should not be seen primarily as a test of which nationalities are best. It is more important to select immigrants with an eye to the collective effect on the nation. An immigration policy is not a symbol, a banner, of a nation's attitude to other peoples or races; and to reject potential immigrants is in no way to doubt the worthiness of their nationality or culture.”

“Our immigration policy is increasingly based on an appeal to international precepts that our neighbours sensibly refuse to practise. We are surrendering much of our own independence to a phantom opinion that floats vaguely in the air and rarely exists on this earth. We should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world.”

“I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny…. As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better.”

“The history of Australia, black or white, is not only the struggle between peoples but the struggle between nature and people. Nature tamed many of the settlers, sometimes defeating them, but people held many victories, sometimes at high cost.”

“The shrinking world was becoming too small to permit a whole people to be set aside in a vast protected anthropological museum where they would try to perpetuate the merits and defects of a way of life that had vanished elsewhere, a way of life that - so long as it continued - would deprive millions of foreign people of the food and fibres that could have been grown on the land.”

“Innovation is usually not a gigantic step but a series of small jumps involving various enterprising people whose names are soon forgotten.”

“There is a delicate balance between shielding people and encouraging them, and the USA perhaps went too far in one direction and Australia in the other. The Soviet Union, born in 1917 and influenced a little by the exciting Australian and New Zealand experiments, would eventually show how the umbrella, if too big and cumbersome, exposed people far more than it protected them.”

“There are dangers in the increasing belief that toleration can simply be imposed on people by a variety of new laws and by a bureaucracy specializing in ethnic affairs, cultural relations and human rights. Unfortunately, the laws and regulatory bodies, introduced in the hope of promoting toleration, can be invoked to attack freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and those principles on which minority rights must, in the last resort, depend. A sensible humane immigration policy is more likely than most of these new agencies and laws - present or proposed - to maintain and foster racial toleration.”

“The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions.”

“The convict system in essence was a form of compulsory, assisted migration. It eased the problems created by Australia's distance from Britain. Without it relatively few people from the British Isles would have made the costly journey across the world in Australia's first half century.”

“The multicultural policy has, at times, tended to emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians, thus unnecessarily encouraging divisions and weakening social cohesion. It has tended to be anti-British, and yet the people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants.”

“The eclipse of the Aborigines was tragic. Could it have been averted? It could have been prevented for a time if no British settlers had landed, but eventually people of other European or Asian nations would have come and occupied much of the land.”

“The majority of Australians are now paying the price of a policy that is eager to please each ethnic minority at the expense of the great majority. If the people of each minority should have the right to establish here a way of life familiar to them, is it not equally right - or more so, in democracy - for the majority of Australians to retain the way of life familiar to them?”

“A policy on immigration helps to determine the unity as well as the size of the population. Should Australia so select its immigrants that the society is relatively unified? Or should it select immigrants who promote diversity? Should Australia continue to be dominated by Anglo-Celtic peoples and the English language and institutions? Or should it become the new Eurasia? In choosing immigrants and the pace at which they arrive, how far should we risk social and racial tensions?”

“Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them.”

“People need to feel they belong to their country. Their need for community is most pronounced in a time of adversity. The people who are hit hardest by a depression, who feel that their children will suffer, look for loyalty from the rest of the community and the government. The present immigration programme, in its indifference to the feelings of the old Australians, erodes those loyalties. The multicultural policy, and its emphasis on what is different and on the rights of the new minority rather than the old majority, gnaws at that sense of solidarity that many people crave for.”