White Australia Policy

I have been watching a really interesting program going back over Australian history, especially the "White Australia Policy" and its slow and painful evolution to today.
My experience of the Australian Political establishment stretches  back to the days of the rock solid colonial past and its gate keeper Bob Menzies. The names of Authur Calwell and Harold Holt, along with Menzies were, although coming from different parties, concerned about the plight of the Asian diaspora after the Second World War and the subsequent turmoil caused by the Vietnam War which heralded a massive potential influx of immigrants to Australia. Gough Whitlams Labour Government and then, after the unprecedented intervention by the Governor General (the Queens mouthpiece), Whitlam had to step aside to allow Malcolm Fraser's Liberal Party to form the government and continue the movement to take more and more Asian immigrants.
These names were the grist of my Australian experience, which says as much about me as anything else, and it was interesting to watch old footage of these political titans. There were lots of shots of students parading the streets with anti- segregation posters, as always it had became a moral issue vying with  the practicality of potentially millions of refugees who if they came would swamp a relatively small economy and totally change the fabric of the whole country.
The idealism of youth is a powerful tool and was used by the media to question the concept of keeping Australia white.
The picture of Captain Cook stepping ashore, not many decades previously, was the clinching argument when no one, (other than the Aborigine), it was argued, had an ancestral claim to Australia.
As in all these claims to ownership through ancestry, people have a right to believe their claim. Their fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers are the warp and the weft of their sense of being who they are. Around them, as in South Africa, the symbols of that past lay functioning, providing the systems that made a country work. The buildings and the institutions that had been created by their fore parents. The industry and the substance of the environment which defines a country and comes from a particular source.  It is natural that the people who felt this ancestry meant something would oppose the changing format.
Created in an intellectual ferment with classically based assumption, based on  philosophically contrived, ethical and moral aspirations - held to the be, 'natural law', insisted upon by the powerful elite who were always secure in their own moral vicissitude through their wealth and the security which ameliorates any hardship that change of any kind brings. 
The people, and I include the Aborigine, were always the last to be consulted.