From this angle, rather than being some aberration, it is strikingly obvious that improved education organically undermines racism and hostility to migration and multiculturalism, by allowing the more civilised instincts, which are the ones really innate in human beings, to develop. Betts' and others' (including her ostensible opponent, Ghassan Hage) fancy post-modernist story that university graduates' opposition to racism is some kind of cultural badge of status is, like most post-modern rhetoric, a misreading of social reality or, at best, only a tiny part of a much more complex story.
Betts makes great play of the fact, pointed to by all of these reactionary populists, that the enormous upheaval in English speaking countries against the monstrous imperialist war in Vietnam, was one of the major commencement points in the enormous swing among educated people against all forms of racism and opposition to migration.
These populists associate this development also, in their propaganda, with the explosion in numbers of tertiary educated people, which commenced at approximately the same time. Well, the dates and times are more or less correct, but their interpretation of these developments is only valid if you presume a bigoted racism as the norm in human behaviour.
If you don't, other interpretations present themselves immediately. My interpretation, which I assert to be the valid one, is this: in Australia, with which I am most familiar, the Whitlam period of free education did coincide with the enormous popular mobilisation against the imperialist monstrosity in Vietnam, in which I personally was lucky enough to participate, with many thousands of others. It also coincided, indeed, with the avalanche into higher education of the first substantial generation, out of for instance, Catholic secondary schools, and of other working class and lower middle class Anglo-Australians, and of the first generation in universities of European migrant background.
The dramatic shift in attitudes to race and migration that took place in this period among university graduates, also coincided with the swing of both university undergraduate populations and university graduates to the Labor side in electoral politics. Until about 1969 the overwhelming majority of tertiary students and university graduates, to the number of about 80 per cent, always favoured Liberal in every election in Australia since responsible government.
It was only in the 1969 election that Labor even got to 40 per cent preference amongst tertiary students, and it was only in 1972 that polls suggested a majority of students, for the first time ever, supported Labor. It was only about 1972, also, that a majority of graduates began to swing towards Labor.
All these major changes coincided with the massive expansion of university education to social groups that had never previously had access to it. In this wonderful period of the expansion of tertiary education to new layers, there were a number of significant secondary features. For instance, in 1967 the extra school year was introduced in New South Wales.
As a result, the only freshers in universities were a large cohort of mature-age students who were encouraged to take advantage of the gap year to start university education. (This was the year when the Vietnam antiear protests, incidentally, really began to gather momentum, and it is my very distinct memory that many of these mature-age students, who by then knew a bit about the world, were in the forefront of this development.)
A little later, throughout the 1970s the very notable phenomenon took place of mature-age women students taking advantage of scholarships and the Whitlam free education to get degrees, and many of these women became rather belligerent feminists, having previous been deprived of tertiary education by social circumstances.
In short, the combination of all these factors produced a massive change in the moral, cultural and political climate of the times, and this had a very big and happily enduring impact on the generations who acquired their education in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time of great inquiry, criticism and change.
It may have had its aberrations and eccentricities, but it was a great time to be alive. In this period, as I observed and experienced it, a number of previously latent currents in Australian society came to a certain flowering, such as the basically healthy ethical training in relation to matters like race and migration in Catholic schools.
This was the period when the products of the Catholic education system formed a disproportionate part of the undergraduate population, having been well instructed by the brothers and nuns to take full advantage of all the Whitlam period educational opportunities available to them, which pitched them headlong into the political and cultural radicalisation of the period.
The substantial swing among students and graduates in this period against racism, did owe a lot to the educational revolution of the period, but it also owed a lot to the new moral climate that emerged in these conditions, which actually corresponds more adequately to basic civilised human instincts than the bigoted backwardness that the Katharine Betts of this world believe is normal in human beings.
Happily, these more civilised attitudes have persisted among people who acquired their education over this period. It's their normal state of being in relation to all these matters. There may be a certain amount of group identification in it as well, but that's no bad thing either! It's better to be a proud member of the generation of 1968 or 1972, in my view, than to be a dopey bigot.
Over the last few years I have time and time again had the experience of graduates of the classes of 1968 or 1972 bringing their children into my bookshop, reminiscing about the past and attempting to introduce their sometimes rather bored kids to the delights of Furry Freak Brothers comics and the serious literature of the period.
It is my impression that the decisive sea change on cultural matters, censorship, politics, race and migration made in the 1960s and 1970s, by many people who were educated then, tends to persist into the next generation. Even if the children of the class of 1968 or 1972 are sometimes a bit bored by them, they tend to retain the basic values acquired by their parents during the great sea change.
A rather bizarre aspect of the 25-year Betts-Birrell crusade against migration and multiculturalism is the particular attention these Anglo-Victorians always give to the perceived problems of life in Sydney. Over the period they have made constant dire predictions of social, environmental and economic disaster in Sydney, and later events have mostly proved them wrong.
Over this period Sydney has constantly evolved. There are real problems in Sydney, many of which stem from the successful economic development of Sydney and NSW. A very serious and worthwhile Sydney economist, Phil Raskell, has made his recent life work the careful documentation of, for instance, such things as the widening economic inequality in Sydney.
For this useful project, he has worked extensively on the public statistical records of who pays tax and at what level. But Phil Raskell never overloads his useful and thoroughly commendable work on income inequality, with the vehement anti-migration and anti-development rhetoric that the Monash group does. They tend to grab hold of Phil's economic work, whenever it is published, and then they put their own unpleasant anti-migration spin on it.
Sydney is a very significant city. It has been in the forefront of Australian economic development since the early years of the 20th century. It is now, in fact, Australia's economic and financial capital, and it is the city in Australasia that is most locked into global financial markets and to trade in the region.
It is Australia's global city, and has a similar role to New York, Shanghai, Bombay or London in the US, China, India or Britain. It is at the bottom end in Australia for unemployment and the top end for job creation. It has always had a distinct ethnic and cultural mix.
In the 19th century, Sydney and NSW were widely noted for having the highest proportion of Irish Catholics in the country. For the past 15 years Sydney has been the favoured point of entry for the spectacular wave of Asian migration, and about half the Asians who come to Australia have Sydney as their first preference.
Sydney and NSW have historically had by far the longest period of state Labor governments in Australia. The Labor Party started here in 1891. The defeat of the conscription referendum in 1916 was a product of the size of the Catholic population in NSW and the strength of the labour movement in this state.
NSW was also the site of the greatest ever popular mobilisation of the labour movement against the ruling class during the Lang period in the 1930s. At this moment we have a state Labor government almost as firmly entrenched as two earlier governments, the one led by McKell and the one led by Wran. The present electorally very successful Premier in this Labor government looks like Pinocchio, can't drive a car (like myself), is well known for his literary and historical interests, and is married to a confident Asian migrant, a businesswoman, Helena. He has just been re-elected as Premier in one of the biggest electoral swings in recent history.
Sydney is full of the bustle and activity that so pained one of the literary anti-migrationists. Sydneysiders rather like this bustle and activity, because it means jobs and incomes.
Sydney does have plenty of problems. There is increasing inequality. Housing prices are much higher than elsewhere, which is good for those who own a house, but bad for those who are starting out. Taken as a whole, however, the problems of Sydney are not insoluble and they are not made worse by migration.
Migration actually produces an economic prosperity that lays a basis for the solution of many of these problems. Even the poorest cohort in Sydney, people who live in the Western suburbs, have increased economic opportunities because of the nature of Sydney. The Victorian academics who use Sydney as a shock-horror example of the consequences of migration, are at a considerable loss for an explanation for this basic conundrum. If Sydney is so bad, why is it the favoured point of settlement for about half the people who wish to migrate to Australia?
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