John Singleton with Bob HowardRip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 279-80, under the heading “Xenophobia”.

If the rights of all people all over the world to freedom, life and property and recognised, then there is no possible way a government can restrict immigration. If any person, from any country, can afford to travel here (or find some private person, institution or company to pay his or her fare) and support themselves on arrival, then he or she has a perfect right to do so. However, they do not have a right to government subsidised fares, government welfare on arrival or a right to a job. They are not the taxpayers’ responsibility, and nobody has a right to a job — there is only the right to try and get a job.

Any government that controls immigration is guilty of discrimination, and, as had been mentioned before (see Discrimination) only private individuals and organisations have the right to discriminate. Government’s don’t. Chinese, British, French, American, Italian or African people, black, white, yellow or red people, rich or poor people, skilled or unskilled people — all have one thing in common. They are all, simply people, and as such have equal rights. If they can find a company or individual willing to transport them, a place to stay and a place to work — all based on voluntary agreement on the part of all people involved — then they are violating no person’s rights, are doing no wrong, and therefore cannot be morally stopped from coming here.

One of the minor idiocies of our welfare mentality is that we profess great concern for the starving millions in, for example, India. We send them foreign aid (most of which is eaten up by corruption or administrative expenses anyway). But our governments deny them the two most important kinds of help, and their government denies them the third. Our governments deny them the freedom to export their goods to Australia (by our high tariff levels) and the right to travel here to build a better life for themselves. Their government denies them the help of foreign investment.

If new immigrants arrived here, they would help build a bigger domestic market, which would be good for us. If our manufacturing industry had such a market they wouldn’t need tariff protection and we would all benefit from lower prices.

The immigrants would also probably take up the low wage jobs which most of us won’t touch. This wouldn’t be a bad thing — they’d still be better off than they were in India or wherever, and we’d also be better off. As we have seen with other immigrants, they need to remain long in those jobs. If they work hard and save, as many Italians and Greeks have done, they can soon be in business for themselves, or at least enjoy a much higher standard of living, and do more for their children, than they would ever hope to do in their native country.

But because of some weird idea that “we” own Australia, and because of racial prejudice, we deny them this opportunity. Racial hatred and racial problems are not caused by the mere fact that people are different. They are caused by prejudices, oppression and the arbitrary distribution of privilege to favour one group at the expense of another. Eliminate those (and, at base, they are all caused by government meddling; or people using government meddling for their own advantage) and a multi-racial Australian society can grow and prosper without any more trouble than any other society is likely to have.

It’s very easy to forget that none of us has been here longer than five minutes. And it’s even easier to forget that the only reason we aren’t crying out for immigrants is because a few low-intellect waks in Canberra have allowed a few ignorant pressure groups to con them into forcing Australia to stagnate — and all in the name of progress.