Policy of determining entry and settlement in Australia on the basis of race. As a country that was based on serving working class interests from its federation in 1901 the White Australia Policy was one unfortunate idea of the time, along with
protectionism.
Until 1958 it was subtley applied by having immigration officers apply a
diction test, where prospective migrants had to translate into English a passage of text in a European language selected at the discretion of the immigration officer. So Mr Smith got
English while Mr Ahuja got
Icelandic. The quote '
Two Wongs don't make a White' came from the
Arthur Calwell, Immigration Minister in the late 1940s.
The policy ended either in 1973, although a limited number of non-Europeans managed to migrate because they were scholarship students, spouses or
polyglots who fluked the diction test. There was no systematic policy to discriminate within racial types, such as jews or Slavs, just 'Europeans' and 'Non-Europeans'.
Since then Australia has taken in a large population of the world's migrants - including
refugees. A backlash emerged in the mid-1990s with the advent of
Pauline Hanson, but her support never got anywhere to the levels similar far-right parties in Europe routinely enjoy.
Given that Australia's neighbours have exclusionary immigration policies themselves, or have
human rights abuses that cause people to migrate, Australians are pretty much satisfied about the moral integrity of their immigration laws (although many have reservations about the way they are enforced).