Some historians looking back on our era will probably marvel at the fragile economic arguments used to justify the present migration policy. Even mor… - Geoffrey Blainey

The ethnic composition of the population - and the particular mixture of nationalities, languages and cultures - is a matter of importance to all nations. The selection of immigrants should not be seen primarily as a test of which nationalities are best. It is more important to select immigrants with an eye to the collective effect on the nation. An immigration policy is not a symbol, a banner, of a nation's attitude to other peoples or races; and to reject potential immigrants is in no way to doubt the worthiness of their nationality or culture.

The compound of bigness and communism made Soviet Russia very much an ogre in the 1920s and accentuated her isolation from the rest of the world. In turn the Soviet's acute sense of isolation, the sense of living in a perilous world and, above all, the bitter memory of foreign intervention between 1918 and 1920, made her, in self-defence, more authoritarian in her internal policies, and spurred the campaign to regiment and unify her people and fortify her economy, thus conferring on the word 'communism' an additional wrapping of terror. This sense of isolation must have also intensified the Soviet Union's desire to extend her territory and her sphere of influence in eastern Europe, and she seized the opportunity which came at the end of the Second World War.

The multicultural policy has, at times, tended to emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians, thus unnecessarily encouraging divisions and weakening social cohesion. It has tended to be anti-British, and yet the people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants.