We are often told that Australia needs foreign workers because there are many ‘jobs that Australians won’t do’. Across a wide range of industries – aged care, agriculture, retail, healthcare, hospitality – a common complaint is that Australians are unwilling to fill roles employers would like to see filled.
Recently, for example, South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas argued that we need migrants to ‘wipe the bums’ of the elderly in aged care. During the pandemic, Adam Marshall, then New South Wales Agriculture Minister, said many Australians were too ‘soft and lazy’ to work on farms.
Instead of allowing wages to rise or fixing the way our welfare system impacts the incentives to work, many important people tend to favour another solution – importing foreign workers.
This is nothing new.
Shepherds – The Original Job Australians Would Not Do
In 1841, the New South Wales Legislative Council convened a Committee on Immigration to address what pastoralists in the wool industry described as a crisis. The pastoralists needed shepherds for their flocks, and they could not get enough of them. This, they argued, threatened not only the expansion but the viability of the colony’s largest export industry.
Shepherding was not especially gruelling work, but the life was monotonous, isolated and austere. It was a low-status job done mainly by assigned convicts. Free settlers from Britain generally had better options in a colonial economy where labour was scarce. According to one pastoralist, free settlers told him they ‘will not “crawl” after sheep.’
Shepherding was the original job Australian workers would not do.
As the transportation of convicts to New South Wales was reduced over the 1830s and then discontinued in 1840, pastoralists petitioned for a new source of shepherds – indentured Indian workers. By 1841, a few farmers had already secured some Indian workers, and they wanted more. A lot more.
Reading the testimony of these pastoralists is striking. They were aggrieved about the unreliability and high expectations of British settlers in a tight labour market. They provided explicit details about just how much cheaper – and tractable – Indian workers were compared with both free settlers and convicts. And they warned of dire economic consequences if their request was declined.
Colonial authorities listened – and said no.
Authorities Wanted an Egalitarian and Cohesive Australia
This decision was based on a clear understanding of the economic and social impact of cheap foreign labour. It also reflected officials’ insistence that the narrow interests of employers should not trump broader goals.
The Committee on Immigration agreed that a temporary arrangement to bring in Indian workers might be possible in theory but argued it would be impossible to implement in practice. Opening the door to limited numbers would create pressure for more. The result, they predicted, would be lower wages, fewer British settlers, and the creation of a permanent underclass ‘necessarily doomed to occupy a station of inferiority’.
This opposition was not limited to officials in Sydney but extended to the summit of imperial power in London. Sir James Stephen – the senior official running colonial policy from 1836-47 – specifically opposed this idea in documents addressed to his direct boss, the Colonial Secretary.
In one document in 1841, Stephen alluded to the parallels between indentured Indian labour and slave labour:
‘As we now regret the folly of our ancestors in colonising North America from Africa, so should our posterity have to censure us if we should colonise Australia from India.’
In another, in 1843, he rejected this proposal on the grounds that it is the duty of a government ‘to protect those whose only property is the power of their labour against the rapacity of the rich’.
This was more than ten years before the famous stonemasons’ strike in 1856.
Organised labour did not stop the importation of indentured Indian workers in the 1840s. Colonial authorities did. And they did that because they had a vision of Australia as a British nation where social cohesion and an egalitarian society were prioritised.
Gold and Wire Fences
The pressure to import cheap foreign labour did not go away but Australia’s economy was transformed by the gold rush of the 1850s. Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish people arrived here over that decade, boosting both the supply of and the demand for labour.
So, what happened to fix the shepherd shortage?
As John Pickard of Macquarie University has shown, pastoralists gradually replaced shepherds with wire fences in response to changes in land tenure, the increased demand for meat, and more effective dingo poisons. One property running 40,000 sheep, which had previously required 15 or 20 shepherds, needed only four or five boundary riders after fencing was installed. Denied access to cheap labour, pastoralists changed how the work was done.
Pickard compares this with South Africa, where cheap labour remained readily available in the form of native African workers who had far fewer legal and economic rights. There, the transition to wire fences was slower, only accelerating after the diamond rush of the 1870s.
Where labour is cheap, innovation is delayed. Where labour is scarce and expensive, it is accelerated.
Different Century, Same Old Argument
In 1841, powerful interests insisted that Australia needed to import cheap foreign workers to do the jobs locals ‘would not do’. Their arguments are closely echoed to this day – the difficulty of obtaining staff, the costs involved, and the need to ensure important industries function effectively.
But now the resistance to these arguments is much weaker. It’s no longer just big business making the case for cheap foreign labour. Both major political parties have generally endorsed and allowed high levels of immigration when in government for decades now. The trade union movement has provided little opposition. And progressives in the media and the academy vilify any resistance to high immigration as ‘racist’.
So where are we now? Despite hundreds of thousands of foreigners already working in the Australian workforce, still the argument is that we need to import more to keep our nation functioning and avoid economic disaster.
Wrong. Pay locals more. Fix incentives. Innovate.
Colonial authorities in the 1840s had the judgment and foresight to resist the pressure for Australia to solve its problems with cheap foreign labour. They recognised more important social goals and acted accordingly. And the colonial economy adapted.
Today, our current leaders show much less wisdom. They accept the claim that high levels of immigration are necessary because they think there are so many jobs that Australians will not do.
That argument was a fallacy in 1841. It still is. It is up to Australian voters to elect different leaders with more wisdom.
