You can never be an Aussie

Submitted by An ex-Aussie (New Zealand), Jan 12, 2006 at 02:51

For a country that had till lately a "White Australia" policy, it is not going to be easy to embrace multiculturalism. Multiculiturism was only adopted by Aussies as a result of the labour shortages in the country that could not be filled by the $10 immigrants from UK. This took further hold when Keating declared that we need to work with the neighbouring Asian countries better to boost and sustain our economy.

This may have progressed further and could have matured, but enters Howard with his heightened sense of preservation of white identity of the country and we sink back into our xenophobic basis.

It has long been recorded that foreigners achieve full employment a lot later than white refugees in the country - about 6 months later. This remains the case where the white migrants happen to be from countries where english is not the native language and their education is as obsolete as the Russian computers.
Colored immigrants are also paid less than the average white worker. About 40% less.

In the years that aussies have accumulated slave labour, they allowed them to rot away in ghettos rather than promoting assimilation. Witness Cabramatta and Campsie. With no assimiation policies and latent discrimiation existing is there any wonder that segments of population don't feel they belong.

And should these migrants come over all of this then there is always the perennial question to be answered - Where are you from? Obviously you can't be from Australia if you are colored.

As someone put it a while ago - a colored person can never be an aussie, you can only be ever an australian citizen of foreign descent.

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