NEWS from one hundred years ago: WHITE NEW ZEALAND

The end of the war has brought a sudden surge of newcomers from Gujarat and Guangdong. Although wealthy ‘whites’ are not worried, shopkeepers and market gardeners are anxious about intensifying competition from incoming Chinese and Indians. The conservative Massey government hopes that a new law will take the tiresome ‘Asiatic Question’ out of politics. The Immigration Restriction Amendment Act of 1920 will allow nobody entry into the country unless they have explicitly been granted a permit by the state. Massey says that while there is ‘no injustice intended to the people of any other country who come here,’ the government has ‘a perfect right’ to make its own immigration policy.[i] ‘Clearly, we want to keep the race as pure ... as it is possible to keep it.’[ii] The Labour Party is in two minds about the new law. Socialist internationalism is growing yet a lot of working people look askance at Chinese and Indians as a threat to wages and jobs. Harry Holland, compositor, boyish and emotional, is leader of the Labour Party. He chooses his words carefully. On one hand he wants to safeguard the white working class. On the other hand he wants to uphold international socialism and its commitment to racial equality. The ‘same red blood of humanity flows in the veins of all of us,’ he tells parliament. The door, though, must not be opened too wide to workers whose standards of living are low. The employer, not the worker, wants cheap workers to come into the country.[iii]

[i] PD, vol. 187, 14 September 1920, 905, 908.
[ii] Ibid., 908.
[iii] PD, vol. 187, 14 September 1920, 912–3.