The Asianisation of Australia: volume 2, part 1, section 8
Misleading Statistics
As John Bennett has stated: "Figures put out by the Government on the extent of legal Asian immigration, of illegal Asian immigration, the current percentage of Asians in Australia, and the likely percentage of Asians in ten and twenty years time are often misleading or deliberately deceptive"(23).
In 1984, Professor Geoffrey Blainey said "It is important to know how Australia will be affected if the present rate of Asian immigration continues for the next fifteen or twenty years. The official view is that Australia's population will not be noticeably altered"; he went on to explain how the then Asian population (in 1984) was given as 2% to 2.1% of the general Australian population, being estimated to reach only 4% by the year 2000. Blainey says "It is reasonable to suggest, however, that the immigration estimates are misleading". Blainey revealed how the Asian population figures are "cooked"(24):
A) The whole of West Asia is removed from the statistics, by deliberately having it listed separately under the category of "The Middle East" (whereby West Asia is combined with North Africa). Blainey was quite right when he said "The immigration department has followed the old trick of ignoring the western part of Asia, without revealing its omission"(25).
B) The figures given are those of the last Census, thereby excluding the following few years of the Asian immigration intake. Also, West Asia was excluded from the Census statistics for Asia. When Blainey wrote about this in 1984, this point was particularly relevant, as such figures were "thus omitting one of the most vigorous phases of Asian immigration in our history"(26).
C) These official statistics "counted none of the local-born children of Asian immigrants", who comprise a very important - and numerous - part of the Asian population of Australia(27).
Blainey pointed out that
"These are unusual distortions in arriving at a figure on a matter of national importance"; but this was, no doubt, an academic understatement - it would be more correct to have stated quite clearly that various prominent people in the Government, public service, media, etc., were deliberately using statistics that they knew were untrue (or "misleading" at best)(28).
As Blainey said,
"By means of those loaded calculations, several hundred thousand Asians living in Australia have been sent underground. We have been told that they no longer exist. Using the same method of calculating, it would be easy to compute that the European and British peoples formed only one in five of Australia's population... In Australia's federal history, few forecasts on an issue of importance are as incompetent and, perhaps, as mischievous as this forecast of Australia's ethnic or racial composition"(29).
The Asianisation of Australia:
Statistics (Immigration, Ethnicity, and Trade) (Volume 2)
Australian Nationalism Information Database - www.ausnatinfo.angelfire.com
