Australia - Languages - Britannica

“Populate or perish”

Australia’s diminutive population prior to the outbreak of World War II became further reduced after it suffered some 40,000 deaths during the war. Annual wartime population growth rates during the period from 1939 to 1945 averaged a low 1 percent, with growth from migration being particularly low. The severe labour shortages that occurred during the war and the need for skilled workers to reconstruct and industrialize the country was a significant factor in the change that occurred to the government’s migration policies in the postwar years.

The spread of communism and the wartime threat of Japanese occupation instilled fear and heightened the need for a larger defense force in Australia. Moreover, the mounting belief that substantial growth was essential for the country’s prosperity led Prime Minster Ben Chifley to review immigration policies. In order to secure the country against the possibility of future invasion and to improve the strained postwar economy, large-scale immigration programs were considered essential for increasing the country’s population. Australia’s first Department of Immigration was established in 1945, and Australians were urged by Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell to “populate or perish.”

At the outset, the federal government preferred to maintain British and Irish immigration at a high rate, which was encouraged with the promotion of the “Bring out a Briton” campaign. However, because of improved economic conditions in Britain, this program failed to achieve the intended quota. To further increase the population, the Australian government negotiated “assisted migration” and “private sponsorship” agreements with other European countries that had been left devastated by war and with Middle Eastern countries. People from countries in eastern Europe that had been invaded by the Soviet Union or otherwise incorporated into the Soviet bloc (including Poland, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) fled dislocation and persecution. In 1947 the Australian government negotiated agreements with the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) to settle at least 12,000 displaced people a year from Soviet bloc countries.