Rob writes from home (and permits a forward):
>G'day Jo,
>
>Actually, we got rid of the White Australia Policy back in '63 (although an
>erstwhile Australian immigration minister with whom I regularly get horribly
>drunk reckons we still had racist selection officials getting away with racist
>discrimination up to 1974). Anyway, I was talking about roughly '88 to '96 -
>the late Hawke and the Keating years.
I know the W.A. Policy was abolished in the sixties; call me old, but I call that recent. And Oz is still getting away with a kind of racist discrimination, in the form of the detention centres. (I may be making unreasonable assumptions, but if the refugees were largely pale skinned and blue-eyed I doubt they'd be roasting in tin huts in the bush.) It's worth pointing out that there was an intervening time when there was fairly good government in Oz, but what's happening now is, as I see it, not something new but a harking back to earlier attitudes. Only this time it's a circling of the wagons.
cheers, Joanna S.