2 sept 1945 año - “Populate or Perish" Policy
Descripción:
In the years after the Second World War, migrants provided much-needed labour for Australia's reconstruction and industrialisation as well as human capital for the nation's defence. The popular belief was that Australia must 'populate or perish'. It was an important note that during the war Australia had been on the verge of invasion from Japan - a national experience which reaffirmed the racist xenophobia which gave birth to the White Australia Policy around fifty years earlier.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Ben Chifley, Prime Minister of Australia (1945-1949), established the federal Department of Immigration to administer a large-scale immigration program. Chifley commissioned a report on the subject which found that Australia was in urgent need of a larger population for the purposes of defence and development and it recommended a 1% annual increase in population through increased immigration.
The first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, promoted mass immigration with the slogan "populate or perish".
The 1% target remained a part of government policy until the Whitlam Government, when immigration numbers were substantially cut back, only to be restored by the Fraser Government. Some 4.2 million immigrants arrived between 1945 and 1985, about 40 per cent of whom came from Britain and Ireland. By 2007, some 6.5 million people have migrated to Australia since 1945. This represents a significant proportion of the overall population increase experienced by Australia in that time, having gone from 7 million in 1945 to the present total of over 23 million.
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Australia After WWII
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