All for Australia is a 1984 book by Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...

. It criticizes Australian immigration policy

Immigration to Australia

Immigration to Australia is estimated to have begun around 51,000 years ago when the ancestors of Australian Aborigines arrived on the continent via the islands of the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea. Europeans first landed in the 17th and 18th Centuries, but colonisation only started in 1788. The...

 and the direction in which it is shaping the nation. In particular, the book is critical of what Blainey views as the disproportionately high levels of Asian immigration to Australia since the mid-1970s.

Overview and main themes

In All for Australia, Blainey argues:

• For the sake of national unity, the typical nation practices discrimination against migrants on the basis of ethnicity. Ironically, the Asian countries which Australia is too afraid to "offend" have no hesitation in using this right to retain their current ethnic compositions.

• Every nation relies on a sense of community. That sense of community belonging can easily be damaged by the rapid entry of foreign peoples who unintentionally erode national cohesion.

• Immigration is one of the most important issues facing a nation. The notion that it is too contentious to be publicly debated makes a mockery of democracy
  Democracy
  Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
  
  .

• Multiculturalism
  Multiculturalism
  Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
  
   tends to emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians, thus unnecessarily encouraging division and threatening social cohesion.

• The policy of multiculturalism has tended to be implicitly anti-British
  Great Britain
  Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
  
  , despite Australia's British colonial heritage and the large number of post-World War II
  World War II
  World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
  
   British immigrants to Australia.

• Australian immigration policy has moved from one extreme to another, from a policy that sought to encourage European immigration and restrict Asian immigration (White Australia policy
  White Australia policy
  The White Australia policy comprises various historical policies that intentionally restricted "non-white" immigration to Australia. From origins at Federation in 1901, the polices were progressively dismantled between 1949-1973....
  
  ), to a policy that now gives disproportionate preference to Asian immigration. Blainey asserts that this preferential treatment of Asian immigrants partly arose from a sense of guilt over the Vietnam War
  Vietnam War
  The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
  
  , but also reflected Canberra
  Canberra
  Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory , south-west of Sydney, and north-east of Melbourne...
  
  's misguided view that more trade with Asian countries would come with a larger Asian population.

External links

• Strangers In Their Own Land - synopsis of the major points made in All For Australia