It wasn't until 1973 that the Whitlam Government finally dismantled the White Australia Policy. The first significant increase of migrants from non-European countries took place under the Fraser Government, after it came into office in 1975. What was rebuilt from the dismantling was Australia as a multicultural society. Until the early 1970s, the labour movement was solidly behind the White Australia Policy: that policy was pretty much the program of the working class and the trade union movement, although it was approved of generally during the first part of the 20th century.

Gwenda Tavan's recent book The Long, Slow Death of White Australia deals with the demise of the White Australia Policy. I have not read this text and so I'm relying on Fraser's interpretation. This holds that this Melbourne historian's account emphases the reasons for the ascendancy of White Australia were racism and xenophobia, and that these were the driving forces in the campaign to restrict non-white immigration. Tavan argues that, though the White Australia policy was abolished by stealth in the 1950s and 1960s, due to a fear of a public backlash if the increasing numbers of non-European migrants became widely known, there was also much evidence of public support for the changes to the White Australia that were taking place.

Tavan argues that the debate still continues" over how many non-whites should be allowed to enter Australia and that whilst " White Australia" is no longer a "dominant worldview;" it persists as a "residual cultural form." Recent events in the last decade ---Pauline Hanson and the Tampa incident---indicate that "the white, Anglo-Celtic racial-cultural ideals" of Australian nationality stil burn as embers. It would appear that Tavan fears that the unexpected resurgence of populism, nationalism and the naturalist, exclusivist portrayal of the nation in the 1990s is the result of the re-emergence of deeply, culturally ingrained ethnic perception of social belonging. This is the ‘return of the repressed' of ancient ethnic hatreds thesis.

On Fraser's interpretation Gavin, like Windshuttle, is a racial egalitarian concerned to drive a stake through the heart of racial realism, once and for all. They resolutely deny that differences between "races" have a biological or genetic foundation and argue that the evident differences between the various races of mankind are the malleable product of their cultures. On this view it is a fundamental category error to slide from the concept of culture to that of race because cultural differences are not inbred, immutable, and biologically grounded.

This is what Andrew Fraser disputes.

Suprisingly, he does so by considering ethnic and civic nationalism and the way that civil nationalism has acted as the ground for Australian identity. The common position is that tribal nationalism' and ‘atavistic ethnocentrism' of White Australia is a populist nationalism that is a reactionary, atavistic and irrational phenomenon. Underpinning this is the ‘modernizationist' argument that revisits classical modernization theory as developed in the 1950s and 60s to understand modernization as the transition from a closed, particularist, undifferentiated, and hierarchical Gemeinschaft to an open, universalist, functionally differentiated, and individualist Gesellschaft.

It is y then held that this ethnic nationalism can be overcome through the adoption of the ‘right' institutional structures (the legal-procedurally based political institutions of liberal democratic states) and, in general, through the adoption of a ‘civic' form of nationalism and by adhering to the ‘constitutionalist' model. This cages the explosive force of the ethnic nationalism underpinning White Australia.

Fraser contests the duality of ethnic and civic nationalism by considering the work of Rodger Scruton and Maragart Canovan:

Neither Canovan nor Scruton believe that a nation can be grounded in an abstract loyalty to a particular political regime or constitutional order. For Scruton, it is axiomatic that citizens belong to an inherited community inhabiting an ancestral homeland. Citizens are members of a pre-political community that includes the living, their ancestors and their unborn offspring. Absent generations are among the strangers to whom the good citizen is bound in "a common web of rights and duties."...Canovan, too, affirms both that, within any particular nation, "many fellow-nationals really will be blood relations" and that "nations depend upon the symbolism of kinship for much of their emotional appeal." But she rejects the claims of ethnic nationalism, pointing out that "much of that kinship is imagined kinship, and a good deal of it is always fictitious..."

The problem with Canovan's argument is that she does not give sufficient weight to the "peculiarities of the English." As a consequence, like Windschuttle, in relation to the White Australia Policy, she sets up a false dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism.

The relative inclusiveness of English national identity was replicated in the settler dominions. In fact, the English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and even continental European settlers in colonial America, English Canada, Australia and New Zealand fused together to become more British than the British in their new homelands. The creation of those colonial British cultures was an important first step on the road to creating new national identities as Americans, Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders... Civic nationalism was, therefore, a meme replicated best and most easily through the vehicle provided by the Anglo-Saxon genotype.

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