Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A Question of Tolerance
In the 1960s, increasing numbers of Australians saw that Indigenous Australians had en-
dured a great wrong that needed to be put right. From 1976 until 1992 Aboriginal people
won major victories in their struggle for land rights. As Australia's imports from China and
Japan increased, the White Australia policy became an embarrassment. It was officially ab-
olished in the early 1970s, and soon thereafter Australia was a little astonished to find itself
leading the campaign against the racist apartheid policies of white South Africa.
By the 1970s more than one million migrants had arrived from non-English-speaking
countries, filling Australia with new languages, cultures, food and ideas. At the same time,
China and Japan far outstripped Europe as Australia's major trading partners. As Asian im-
migration increased, Vietnamese communities became prominent in Sydney and Mel-
bourne. In both those cities a new spirit of tolerance known as multiculturalism became a
particular source of pride.
The impact of postwar immigration was never as great in Queensland, and the values of
multiculturalism made few inroads into the state's robustly old-time sense of what it means
to be Australian. This Aussie insularity was well understood by the rough-hewn and iras-
cible Joh Bjelke-Petersen, premier of Queensland for 19 years from 1968. New Zeal-
and-born Johannes Bjelke-Petersen was the longest-serving (1968-1987) and longest-lived
(1911-2005) premier of Queensland. He was described as a paradox of piety, free enter-
prise and political cunning or, more succinctly, as 'a Bible-bashing bastard' by Prime Min-
ister Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Kept in office by malapportionment (which gave more voting power to his rural base -
he never won more than 39% of the popular vote), he established a policy of development
on the state. Under his tenure, forests were felled to make way for dams, coal mines, power
stations and other burgeoning infrastructure projects.
Bjelke-Petersen's administration strongly encouraged the development of the Gold
Coast. There were few environmental restrictions as hotels and high-rise apartment blocks
transformed quiet seaside towns into burgeoning holiday resorts. Among many projects un-
der his term was the building of a highway through the Daintree rainforest and the demoli-
tion of historic or heritage buildings to make way for new developments (Brisbane's Bel-
levue Hotel, dating from the 1880s, was demolished - in the middle of the night - despite
public attempts to save it). His plans to drill for oil in the Great Barrier Reef came to noth-
ing when the reef was declared a World Heritage Site in 1981. Meanwhile, Queensland
spent less on social infrastructure than any other state in Australia.
