They would say that, because it takes the heat off them - if you read the article it is about ILLEGAL workers (so changing the act would do nothing), and the real issue is about enforcing the existing law (which has not been done). As an Australian who fought to get his new family into Australia (I am descended from two different families of 1830s settlers in two States but I married and had a child overseas), I can assure you that the issue is not the existing laws, which are quite tight. To a large extent it is not 354 visas either (another beat-up), which companies I have worked for have used to fill skilled places during a lack of Ozzie takers in the mining boom (there could be a case for some tightening, but again it is mostly employers and more particularly labour hire companies not observing the existing law that is the main issue). But not enforcing the law doesn't look good for those supposed to be doing it....and I imagine that was always the issue historically as well. I correspond with a historian in China and he says that race riots did not figure greatly in the accounts of returning Chinese gold diggers - they were mainly seen as fairly limited and local events, and in fact on many goldfields the Chinese diggers were included in negotiations and even represented on councils, and Chinese investment was important, even in quartz mining (eg the Woah Hawp group of mines on the Ballarat lead). The Chinese also discovered goldfields eg the main Canton lead at Ararat, after an afro-American guy discovered the Cathcart goldfield to the west (Blackman's Creek) - the Chinese (forced to walk overland to Bendigo from Robe, hence the discovery) mined the Canton lead for 6 months after discoveries until the Europeans drove them off. The Chinese, Afro-American and aboriginal efforts were later written out of history to create 19th C white mythology during the days of White Australia (I think about three of the main small group of leaders at the Eureka stockade fighting for miners rights were Afro-Americans and a fourth a black Jamaican - the aborigines discovered a number of goldfoelds but the claims for reward were made by Europeans, and aborigines of them did well actually mining gold themselves - the Europeans used to follow them to find out where the gold they sold was conming from).
The overwhelming majority of Chinese went back to China, because they were sent here as contractors to Chinese businesses. This was because Britain forced China to open its ports to trade (previously only one port) after Britain won the Opium Wars in which they flooded China with British-grown opium to damage their economy and force them to open more ports to trade. This opening of ports caused a business slump and massive unemployment in the area of the original port, so local businesses contracted the unemployed to mine gold for them in Australia (far from being illiterate peasants, they came with printed English-Chinese phrase books - "which way is Bendigo", "I love you" "how much is a pick" etc). The main objection by non-Chinese was not mainly that they took jobs (they commonly re-worked ground abandoned as uneconomic by the Europeans) - it was that they looked different and "worked too hard" and so could make the worked-out ground of Europeans pay (if you read Henry Lawson he rants about them working harder than any decent European would). They introduced new mining technologies to goldfields etc - at Beaufort they moved onto worked-out alluvial ground and used puddling machines to economically work "stiff" clay ground, the Europeans thought that was a good idea so drove them off, then the Europeans left and the Chinese came back and re-worked again with hydraulic sluicing, the Europeans thought that was a good idea and drove them off, later the Chinese came back to dredge.... In the Buckland River riots the American diggers got drunk and drove the Chinese diggers into the hills - the next day the Irish diggers hoed into the Americans for doing it....At one time the Victorian population was 23% Chinese and the overwhelming majority of the remainder were my ancestors, the Irish, who were no friends of the Brits (who had caused a million to die in Ireland in the preceding decade in the Potato Famine - one of my ancestors was a 16 year old girl who arrived on a "coffin" (female immigrant) ship speaking only Gaelic and who took the first guy who offered her survival when she got off the boat).
People always find someone to hate and make up excuses of supposed transgressions to do so - the Kalgoorlie race riots were caused by a geologist and mine manager, the later US President Herbert Hoover, who hired Italian miners to work on his mines. How many of our mates on this website are of Italian ancestry (and I see the occassional Chinese and other Middle Eastern, Indian and southern Asian name). If this is deemed a political post, I have done it because Aussies need to recognise that history is stranger than fiction, that what we accept as facts are often far from it, and that we should be careful of posts that may hurt the feelings of other Aussies, including our mates.......and foreigners are only that for a few years until we finally accept them.
