"Innocent until proven guilty."I don't think the media has ever heard the phrase

"[Let this be a] teachable moment where all of us, instead of pumping up the volume, spend a little more time listening to each other. (Pres. Obama)"
 

The 'White Australia' policy describes Australia's approach to immigration from federation until the latter part of the 20th century, which favoured applicants from certain countries.
The abolition of the policy took place over a period of 25 years.

Following the election of a coalition of the Liberal and Country parties in 1949, Immigration Minister Harold Holt allowed 800 non-European refugees to remain in Australia and Japanese war brides to enter Australia.

Over subsequent years Australian governments gradually dismantled the policy with the final vestiges being removed in 1973 by the new Labor government.

The history
The origins of the 'White Australia' policy can be traced to the 1850s. White miners' resentment towards industrious Chinese diggers culminated in violence on the Buckland River in Victoria, and at Lambing Flat (now Young) in New South Wales. The governments of these two colonies introduced restrictions on Chinese immigration.

Later, it was the turn of hard-working indentured labourers from the South Sea Islands of the Pacific (known as 'Kanakas') in northern Queensland. Factory workers in the south became vehemently opposed to all forms of immigration which might threaten their jobs; particularly by non-white people who they thought would accept a lower standard of living and work for lower wages.

Some influential Queenslanders felt that the colony would be excluded from the forthcoming Federation if the 'Kanaka' trade did not cease. Leading NSW and Victorian politicians warned there would be no place for 'Asiatics' or 'coloureds' in the Australia of the future.

In 1901, the new federal government passed an Act ending the employment of Pacific Islanders. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 received royal assent on 23 December 1901. It was described as an Act 'to place certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants'.

The Act prohibited from immigration those considered to be insane, anyone likely to become a charge upon the public or upon any public or charitable institution. It also included any person suffering from an infectious or contagious disease 'of a loathsome or dangerous character'.

The Act also prohibited prostitutes, criminals and anyone under a contract or agreement to perform manual labour within Australia (with some limited exceptions).

Other restrictions included a dictation test which was used to exclude certain applicants by requiring them to pass a written test. Often tests were conducted in a language the applicant was not familiar with and had been nominated by an immigration officer.

With these severe measures the implementation of the 'White Australia' policy was warmly applauded in most sections of the community.

In 1919 the Prime Minister, William Morris Hughes, hailed it as 'the greatest thing we have achieved'.

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To read more, click http://www.immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/08abolition.htm#a

That was 30+ years ago. Things have changed. But, sad to say, to a certain extent, racism still exist.

GEORGE MEGALOGENIS  The Australian  September 15, 2012 12:00AM

THE national navel-gazing about whether the mining boom has ended or just peaked misses the point about what will determine Australia's place in the Asian Century.

The business of digging up rocks happens to be the easier part of the engagement. Our open economy is better able to handle income shocks either up or down than it did behind the tariff wall. Compare the first couple of phases of the mining boom since 2003 with the terms of trade boom in 1973, which unglued the Whitlam government. Or the bust of 1982-83, which brought down the Fraser government, with the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, or indeed the global financial crisis in 2008-09. If China suffers a serious growth pause, our own recent history tells us we'll be OK.
Where the Australian model is vulnerable is on immigration, the big area of public policy we got right decades before we deregulated the economy.
The customers of our quarry, China and India, are also our recruits - the people we have decided are best suited to keep our economy growing and to make our nation more interesting.
They are skilled, cashed-up and replacing the British-born as the top immigrant groups in our two largest cities. What could possibly go wrong with this transaction?
An early warning is contained in a special Mind and Mood report from Ipsos Mackay into the attitudes of new Australians. It found immigrants from China, India, Vietnam and Somalia more optimistic than the general population about our future, with one sharp caveat: in the area of education, we risk damaging our reputation for openness and fairness.
The problem is not the usual mistaken culprit of racism, but complacency. Both sides of politics and the bureaucracy make the false assumption that because our Chinese and Indian immigrants have high levels of education and very low levels of crime compared with the national average, we don't need to worry about how they are getting along. And if they don't like it here, well, they could always leave. Therein lies the rub.
To retain a steady flow of quality immigrants, we have to lift our own expectations about what sort of nation we should be.
Egalitarianism is always in the eye of the beholder. As established Australians get richer, we express our desire for fairness in silly ways by insisting on government handouts for those who don't need them, and refusing to tell the cashed-up but less-educated part of the nation to lift their standards.
New Australians have a different take. They are prepared to pay whatever entry price we place; they just don't understand why they don't get excellence in return.
The Mind and Mood report contains strong criticism from international students.
"Apart from the Somali groups, the participants who seemed most vulnerable in the labour market were international students," the report says. "They talked about being 'doubly exploited'. They were paying copious amounts of money for an Australian education and spoke at length about the high cost of everything related to living and learning in this country."
Here is an exchange between three Indian men in their 30s.
Indian man 1: If we are international student, we have to pay the triple of the normal person who lives in Australia. He has to pay maybe $2500 or $3500 a year, we have to pay $25,000 to $30,000.
Indian man 2: And we are allowed to work only for 20 hours, that's our problem.
Indian man 3: [At the seminars promoting Australian courses in India] ... they tell us that everything is there [in Australia], easily we can get job. Accommodation, everything will be arranged. Everything will be easy. But when we come here and see the reality, that isn't it. It's very different.
If a focus group discussion of third- or fourth-generation Australians yielded this sort of complaint, politics would have addressed it long ago.
But even our most successful immigrant groups never reach critical mass to be able to bend the parliament to their will. This is a good thing in many respects, but it carries the risk of institutional bias in favour of the parts of the electoral map that are whiter than the national average.
Take a look at the distribution of our Chinese and Indian waves in the attached table. They have followed the southern European pattern, with the largest numbers concentrating in Sydney and Melbourne. The tables have been adjusted from the initial census release to better compare like with like - the British are lumped together, as are the Chinese from the mainland and Hong Kong. Note how the Chinese are already No 1 in Sydney - our initial crunching of the numbers had the mainland Chinese just behind the English-born. But the broader definition of Chinese still doesn't get them into the top five in Perth. The mining capitals of Perth and Brisbane, and the wannabe mining capital of Adelaide, are the only cities where the Poms are more than 5 per cent of total population.
Some of our finest Australians are born in Britain - Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, to name but two. But the Poms brought us whingeing and the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader are champions in the sport of finding fault.
Gillard is the Adelaide Pom, wanting to freeze-frame the nation. The focus groups tell her to slow population growth, which is code for talking down the immigration intake. She has yet to confront voters with Australia's need for more people.
Abbott is more like the Perth Pom, loud and almost consciously offensive to the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Sydney and Melbourne.
It is funny, almost endearing, but their collective carping - sourced as it is to an imagined middle Australia somewhere west of where the ethnic minorities live in Sydney - is damaging the national interest.
We are used to the rest of the world liking us. We know it each time we travel overseas. When the question "Are you American?" is answered correctly in the negative, the follow-up tends to be along the lines of "I have cousins in Richmond and Fremantle, do you know them?"
Australia never had to worry about the loyalties of the Poms, the Greeks, the Italians, or the Vietnamese because their homelands stalled while we blossomed. There were always more relatives who wanted to join us than were going the other way.
The Chinese and Indians who come here are leaving nations that are rising. The message they send back home - even if they settle in Australia - affects our standing in the region whether we realise it or not.

If the Chinese and Indians think less of us because we are ripping them off, or because we don't trust them to run companies or to represent us in parliament, that is our problem, not theirs, because they will look somewhere else - either back home, or the US, which can never be counted out in the long run.

Our future in Asia is as the world's best immigration nation, that is, as Australians. But we need more, not fewer, Chinese and Indians [and Filipinos?] to want to live across the country to prove it.

Not meant to discourage kababayans back home from apply for mining jobs here.

“Adventure is a path.
Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world.
The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it.
Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both.
This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins
 

what has happened to our City in LA? the riots should have been done in Florida and not here

LA is the hub for racial riots. Remember Rodney King? Hehe