Chinese Australians yesterday began a campaign urging the government to apologize for past policies based on racial discrimination.
Daphne Lowe Kelley (劉瑞馨), president of the country’s Chinese Heritage Association, said Australia should formally say sorry for policies dating back to the mid-1800s that unfairly targeted Chinese migrants.
Ships docking in British colonies were only allowed to carry a certain quota of Chinese and Australia was the first country to use a “head tax” to try and limit their numbers — a move soon adopted by Canada and New Zealand.
Punishing immigration laws known as the “White Australia Policy” followed, with impossible literacy tests used to ban foreigners and requirements that saw Chinese men welcomed as cheap labor, but their families excluded.
Some children were split from their fathers for decades and those Chinese who made it to Australia, lured by the promise of the 1850s gold rush, endured vilification, abuse and violent race riots.
“For about 120 years, the Chinese were certainly not on an even keel with other Australians,” she added. “We would like to see some sort of recognition that this was unjust.”
New Zealand, Canada and the US state of California had all offered apologies to their Chinese communities for similar policies and Lowe Kelley said it was the “right time” for Australia to follow suit.
Canberra’s recent apology to former child migrants from Britain for abuse suffered in state-run orphanages and its 2008 apology to Aborigines for wrongs since white settlement in 1788 added weight to the call, she said.
Anti-Chinese sentiment has flared in Australia in recent years linked to growing waves of investment from the fast-growing Asian giant in local mining companies.
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