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Moss Cass describes the role of the ALP with ending the White Australia policy.

Moss Cass and Mara Moustafine.

Created:

unknown

Date Added:

07 April 2009

Source:

source not available

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

7.1 MB

Length:

02min42sec

Transcript

00:05

When Gough won in – a lot of seats in ’69 and I got in, he then proceeded to act on it, or you know, the whole approach changed, we were clear, we were not going to have a bar of it. And to be truthful and honest, by then the Libs had started to change their tune a bit. Well then – I mean the Liberal, the conservatives had never had a policy of white Australia, officially in their platform, as far as I’ve ever known. It’s only ever been the Labor Party.

00:37

But for most of the time, the Labor Party was never, ever, ever in power. It was always implemented with knobs on by the conservative governments. And when the Labor Party – and you know, much of the social advances that we experienced were not in the – in the beginning implemented by a Labor Government because there never were any. But there was such agitation in the community, it became quite clear, even to conservatives that you had do something. The Labor Party has influenced the course of development of this country, mostly from the opposition benches. And immigration was the same, it is true that the Liberals had actually Liberalised it quite significant by the time we got there. But we just put knobs on it and made it absolutely certain that it was the situation.

01:25

Grassby was the one who talked about it before we got in, I mean he was elected the same time as I was in ’69 and he harped on about all these sorts of things. And then he was made the minister and he led – as far as I was concerned he led the discussion on these sorts of issues. But Gough backed it up, I mean, after all, Gough had been the new leader when he – the Dunstan Report had come in and he’d accepted it, probably argued in favour of a change; I’m sure he would have.

02:003

There’d been a change in the whole atmosphere in the Labor Party, the fact that a predominantly trade union meeting in 1961, and ’60 or whenever I was in Victoria, had not interjected, listened intently and then overwhelmingly voted on the voices in favour of changing the policy it was a shift even in the trade union movement, I think, you know, all the new immigrants who were in the labour force and the old Anglo Saxons recognised they were good blokes. Many of them finished up good lefties, which would have helped in Victoria. Well they were, I mean, a lot of them were socialists. More socialist than we were, Anglos because we didn’t know about it.

02:42

End transcript