However, in other ways this longer statement does clear up some of the nagging doubts left by the earlier news reports and letters to the editor. Early in the debate, Professor Blainey did not identify his own opinions and beliefs: he was simply reporting the views of the average, concerned Australian. The book has made it clear that these are, in fact, Blainey’s own views. There is also no doubt that the target is a single racial group, the Asians, and in particular those from Indo-China. One example illustrates this point:

Most Australians now respect their history, and the success of the new film industry is built on this enthusiasm for the past and for the harsh landscapes and unpretentious heroes. The quickening interest in native plants, in Australian antiques, in family history, and in the Aboriginals’ long history, reflect this nationalism. Few are prouder of Australia than the children of Estonian, Ukrainian, Dutch, German, Italian, Yugoslav and other European immigrants of the early post-war years.

If people are for the first time intensely proud of what their nation has achieved, and of the path it has travelled, they are slightly puzzled to learn that it might have been better if they had travelled a different path: if their nation had from the start been multiracial or if it had encouraged the Chinese to continue to pour into the goldfields in the nineteenth century.

This view of a multiracial society only coming into existence after the arrival of the first Vietnamese refugees in 1978 also leads Blainey to mistakenly date the beginnings of the multicultural movement to the post-1978 period. It is also clear that Blainey has little evidence upon which to base his arguments: he prefers to rely on an untested assertion that unlike most politicians and the non-elected government officials, he truly understands the mood and feelings of the populace.

Many of his arguments in fact fly in the face of a good deal of detailed research. Admittedly, it is difficult to trace all of the effects on the job market of the arrival of immigrants, but available evidence does suggest that migration does cause a net increase in jobs even in periods of recession: Blainey ignores this evidence, preferring to assert that ‘they’ are taking ‘our’ jobs. Ample evidence has been assembled by the Department of Immigration to show that as a percentage of applicants, Asians are less likely to be accepted as settlers than are citizens of the United Kingdom, and that as a percentage of settler intake migration from Britain has not declined in recent years: yet, Professor Blainey claims that ‘multicultural’ is another name for ‘anti-British’, and that the Hawke government is the most anti-British administration in Australia’s history.

This is certainly a bad book. The arguments are badly put, sometimes verging on the ludicrous – as in his claim that Mr West’s statement that our immigration policy is not discriminatory on racial grounds must be false because we accept New Zealanders outside any quota and without the need for a visa. Little attempt is made to support the arguments that are given, and some of the statements made are simply wrong. However, I would not argue, as some commentators have done, that the intervention of Professor Blainey in this debate, and the writing of this book in particular, should never have taken place. Certainly, the book does not enhance the author’s reputation as a serious historian and scholar, but when future historians do evaluate the Blainey view some of the wider effects may not all appear negative.

It is now possible to talk openly about immigration policy, and that cannot be an altogether bad thing. Those who support continued high levels of immigration have been forced to defend their positions and evaluate their assumptions, and to consider ways of putting over their programmes to the general public after years of assuming that the great social experiment contained in the immigration programme enjoyed almost universal support. In some ways, what has become known as the Blainey debate has forced those people in what Blainey refers to disparagingly as the ‘multicultural industry’ to develop a new agenda for thought, research and action. Clearly there may be a problem of social cohesion in a society which is made up of a range of ethnic groups, each of which is encouraged to retain its language and other elements of its culture. Blainey treats this question in a very simplistic fashion, but we do have to address what has been called ‘the pluralist dilemma’. Our attention has been drawn to the fact that people do feel defensive about what they regard as their ‘territory’ and are resentful of interlopers, and paradoxically this instinct may be strongest amongst those who have been residents of the country for a relatively short time. It could also be argued that those who express the most open hostility to ‘outsiders’ are often the least likely to grant the legitimate rights of the only citizens of Australia that are not recent immigrants, the Aborigines.

More generally, the urgency of the search for a re-defined national ethos has been underlined. Professor Blainey dismisses the assumption that Australia is part of Asia and regrets policies that might be construed as anti-British. We do have to accept that fact that in terms of trade and defence, like it or not, we are part of Asia, and we have to search for ways in which a predominantly ‘European’ country might reach some kind of accommodation with Asian neighbours. To be fair, many of these questions were being debated long before the speech at Warrnambool, but happily the pace has quickened. Blainey’s book is poorly constructed, and it contains nothing that will present a serious challenge to those who have a vision of an independent, distinctive and more exciting future for Australia. There are challenges that have to be met, even though this book is not one of them, and the current debate may in the end be seen to have encouraged serious discussions about alternative futures.