The storm over Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s remarks on migrants, and Bill Shorten’s likening him to Pauline Hanson, show highly-selective historical memories.

We all know. of course, that the Liberals are the party of racism and xenophobia. But, wait a minute. Who said, at the time of the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, with desperate Vietnamese refugees besieging boats and aircraft to escape: ‘I’m not having hundreds of f–king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us?’ Well, it was Gough Whitlam, actually. And he meant it: Whitlam gave specific orders that the RAAF not be used to evacuate Vietnamese, apart from a tiny handful including orphans whose lives (unlike those of former Saigon soldiers, police or Australian embassy employees) were probably not in danger. Whitlam then took himself off to a conference in Jamaica and could not be contacted.

Who was it begged Whitlam, unavailingly, to show some humanity towards Vietnamese refugees during the six months between the fall of Saigon and Whitlam’s sacking? Who wrote to him: ‘Few issues in my memory have stirred the conscience of the Australian community as much as the Indochina refugee situation. I can only ask you once again to reconsider your narrow and inhumane policy which has prevented all but a very few refugees from achieving a permanent home in Australia’? Yes, Malcolm Fraser. Whitlam, incidentally, took two months to reply to this letter from the Leader of the Opposition, and that was with a brush-off.

Who was it said, as a handful of Vietnamese refugee boats neared Darwin, ‘Return bogus refugees’? Why, that pillar of humanity and future Labor PM Robert Hawke. In fact, his words took up the front page of the Australian of 29 November, 1977. He elaborated: ‘Of course we should have compassion, but people who are coming in this way are not the only people who have rights to our compassion. Any sovereign country has the right to determine how it will exercise its compassion and how it will increase its population.’ (Words, very close to those for which John Howard and Geoffry Blainey were later pilloried; Blainey hounded from his Chair). Hawke said that if refugees arrived without government approval they should be sent back, an absurd demand given that the refugees had had to escape the communist regime clandestinely: how could such ‘approvals’ be arranged with the Australian Government beforehand? He demanded that the government make a clear statement that illegal immigrants had no right to land.

Who made the front page of the Perth Daily News with a demand to ‘Halt this refugee flood’? Why, who else but future Labor Premier Brian Burke.

Who attacked the boat people as war-criminals, black-marketeers and brothel-keepers riddled with horrendous and untreatable forms of venereal diseases? Whitlam’s Minister for Immigration and long-term Labor front-bencher Clyde Cameron, backed up by the likes of Labor Senator Mulvihill.

How about taking jobs, the comment for which Mr Dutton was pillaried? It was certainly an ill-considered remark – illiterate refugees would hardly pose competition for jobs, and refugees would be a drain on the community instead of an asset only if they did not take jobs. But who said it first? Julian Mounter wrote in the New Statesman: ‘[Labor} Senator Ted Robertson, when asked whether Australia could really contemplate turning away boats which managed to reach her shores, said: “Why not? We have a serious unemployment problem… you could say we have 10,000 people too many, anyway.”

On 6 December, 1977, the Courier-Mail quoted the president of the Queensland Trades and Labor Council, Mr Hausenschild, to the effect that the sudden influx of refugees was a plot to smuggle in cheap labour for the mining of Uranium, thus pressing two buttons simultaneously. Other Labor spokesmen accused the refugees of bringing in gold and servants. Mr Hausenschild did not elaborate on the question of how he thought this plot had been arranged, presumably between Australian Uranium mining interests, the Federal Government, the Vietnamese penniless yet simultaneously gold-carrying refugees, and the Government of Vietnam. This attack from the left was made on the opposite grounds to those claiming the Vietnamese were rich capitalists. It claimed the refugees were ‘without homes, possessions or jobs’ and thus a ready-made cheap labour force. For the left, any stick was good enough with which to beat the notion of accepting or helping the refugees. According to the Australian, in August, 1979, Brisbane watersiders greeted them with chants of ‘you’re not human’ and ‘dirty, greasy worms’, as well as attacking them with billiard queues.

These statements are of course, only a small sample of a mountain more. The pro-ALP and radical-progressive Nation Review, for example, referred to the boat refugees casually, and as a fact, as ‘brothel-keepers and black-marketeers’.

Going back to the foundations of the Labor Party, we find xenophobia amounting to a kind of frenzy. One of the first trade unions, a Miners’ Protective League, stated: ‘We invite men of all nations, except Chinese, to enrol themselves.’ William Lane, the spiritual Godfather of the Party, wrote: ‘Words cannot express our contempt and hatred of those whites who are fighting against their own kith and kin in this racial struggle… The Chinese must go, and their friends, those white traitors, had better be flung out with them.’ A woman, Lane wrote, should never openly express sexuality, since this might lead her to succumb to ‘the most depraved and sensuous race or earth – the yellows’. The Chinaman was ‘The representative of a rival civilization, the standard-bearer of an arch-antagonistic race’. Writing in The Worker Lane advised: ‘I’d sooner see a daughter of mine dead in her coffin then kissing one of them on the mouth or nursing a little coffee-coloured brat that she was mother to.’

White Australia was the first plank of the ALP’s platform, taking precedence even over the socialism objective. John Watson, leader of the ALP and the first Labor Prime Minister anywhere in the world, told the Parliament: ‘We object to them not alone on the grounds of competition with our workmen – though I admit that is one of the grounds – but also and more particularly on the ground of racial contamination…The racial aspect of the question, in my opinion, is the larger and more important one, but the industrial also has to be considered.’

Given Labor’s record, Mr Shorten might consider an apology was in order.