Pauline Hanson's maiden speech: Has Australia been 'swamped by Asians'?

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Newly elected One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson will deliver her maiden speech to the Senate tonight, more than 20 years after her maiden speech to the House of Representatives.

Ms Hanson's 1996 speech was controversial and divisive — she declared most Australians wanted to see Australia's immigration policy "radically" reviewed, and multiculturalism abolished.

"I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians," she said.

"They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate."

At a press conference following her election to the Senate this year, a journalist asked Senator Hanson to reflect on those comments.

Journalist: In 1996 in your maiden speech you said Australia was at risk of being swamped by Asians … how's that gone? Hanson: Well, you go and ask a lot of people in Sydney, at Hurstville or some of those other suburbs, they feel that they have been swamped by Asians.

Twenty years after her infamous speech, what does the data say about the state of Asian immigration in Australia?

Asians in Australia

The Australian Bureau of Statistics collects data on the birthplace of residents in the census, which is conducted once every five years.

A census was conducted in 1996, the year Senator Hanson made her speech, and the most recent census from which we have access to data was in 2011.

This offers us four data points to look at — 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011.

In 1996, the proportion of the Australian population born in South-East Asia, north-east Asia or southern and central Asia was 4.78 per cent. The graph below shows the change in this rate to 2011.

By 2011, the proportion of people in Australia who were born in Asia had almost doubled to 8.08 per cent.

The proportion of people born in Australia fell from 73.93 per cent to 69.83 per cent — more than eight times the proportion of people born in Asia.

James Raymer, head of the School of Demography at the Australian National University, said the incidence of Asian migration to Australia was hardly surprising, given our geographical location in the region and the sheer size of the world's Asian population.

"The whole Asian population represents 60 per cent of the world's population … Europe only represents 10 per cent of the world's population," he said.

"There's a lot of Asians in Europe, there's a lot of Asians in North America, a lot of Asians in Canada, and they've all been increasing."

English remains largest ancestral group

Nick Parr, a demographer in the Department of Marketing and Management at Macquarie University, said grouping all Asians together ignored the cultural diversity of the Asian continent.

"It's a very diverse group of country-of-birth backgrounds," he said.

Professor Raymer said it did not "make sense" to group all Asian ethnicities together.

"Cambodians are very different from Filipinos, Chinese are very different from Koreans and Japanese. These are all very different groups, historically — they all speak different languages," he said.

He also said there were other groups outside of Asia which had increased their proportion of the Australian population in the past 20 years, but were less visible.

He offered the example of New Zealand, which he said "had a very steady increase since 1996".

Indeed, the proportion of people in Australia who were born in New Zealand increased from 1.63 per cent in 1996, to 2.25 per cent in 2011.

"There's been increases in migration [since 1996] from just about all countries, except [those in] Europe," Professor Raymer said.

"The only major migrant groups that haven't grown are north-west Europe, south-west Europe has declined, and the UK has basically held flat."

Despite this, England remains the largest ancestral group in Australia, according to the 2011 census.

"The only [ancestral] group that really dominates … is England. All the other groups are relatively small, considering how big China is … there's quite a big mix of different groups," Professor Raymer said.

Associate Professor Parr agreed.

"Definitely, the Asian-born population has grown. It's grown in number as well as in percentage terms … but if you look at the 2011 census, the largest ancestry categories are English, Australian, Irish, Scottish, German [and] Italian. Chinese is the largest Asian ancestry category, but that's only seventh on the list," he said.

What happened in Hurstville?

Senator Hanson singled out the Sydney suburb of Hurstville as one area where she said people felt they had been "swamped".

Data from the census can be broken down into areas known by the ABS as statistical local areas (SLA), and data on the birthplace of residents in the SLA of Hurstville was collected over the past four censuses.

The proportion of Hurstville SLA residents born in Asia relative to the rest of the population, at 10.7 per cent, was much higher than the national average in 1996.

By 2011, that rate had risen to be 2.5 times higher, at 25.64 per cent, meaning one in four residents were born in Asia.

This represents an average increase of around 1 per cent per year over 15 years.

The proportion of Hurstville SLA residents born in Australia fell almost as rapidly, from 65.86 per cent to 53.87 per cent, although the raw number remained relatively steady at just over 40,000.

Broken down into the most popular nationalities (other than Australian), the rise of Chinese-born people in Hurstville is well above the national average for that ethnicity.

Whilst the proportion of residents of the Hurstville SLA born in Asia has increased much faster than the national average, the proportion of residents born in Australia remains more than double the proportion born in Asia, and the proportion born outside Asia (Australia and others) is almost triple.

When asked about their ancestry in the 2011 census, respondents in the SLA answered Chinese more than any other category.

The only two other Asian ethnicities that scored above 1,000 were Indian and Filipino, and the top of the list was still dominated by Anglo and southern European ethnicities.

The ancestry and birthplace statistics paint an interesting picture of increased Asian migration in Hurstville, but Associate Professor Parr said looking at a small geographical area was beside the point.

"There is variation between geographical regions but focusing on just one isolated region isn't really taking in the big picture," he said.

Cultural clusters can have benefits

Professor Raymer said clustering of migrant groups in certain areas was not a phenomenon restricted to Asian migrants.

He said especially in Western cultures, "it's not unusual for migrants to congregate … it doesn't matter whether you're Asian or not, if you're different and you have different cultural practices and you speak different languages, it's a natural process to want to be around people that you're familiar with".

"And it would be the same for Australians going to Indonesia — Australians tend to concentrate in certain areas in Indonesia," Professor Raymer said.

In an opinion piece for the Australian in 2010, KPMG demographer Bernard Salt exposed a clustering curiosity derived from the 2006 census:

"One of the tightest ethnic concentrations in Australia is a collection of comfortable beachside suburbs on Perth's northside. In postcode 6028, Burns Beach, some 26 per cent of the local population was born outside Australia — in Britain. That's right, Bolshie Burns Beach is as full of British migrants as [the Sydney suburb of] Cabramatta is of Vietnamese."

In the 2011 census, this had increased to more than 27 per cent of the population of that postcode.

Mr Salt remarked that in 2006, the Vietnamese comprised 27 per cent of the population of Cabramatta, postcode 2166, a concentration which was established in only a quarter of a century.

"This is no different to concentrations that were associated with Greeks and Italians in the 1950s and 1960s in places like Melbourne's Carlton and Sydney's Leichhardt, but within a generation these ethnic clusters had dispersed," he said.

Dispersed or not, there can be benefits of the clustering phenomenon — international research has found living around people of a similar cultural background can ease the transition for migrants into Australian life.

Professor Raymer said cultural values already present in Australia were generally a more dominant force than the cultural norms of a migrant's source country, especially for the second and third generations.

"The cultural values and norms which are embedded [in the Australian] constitution are going to have more power than where [immigrants come from]," he said.

Topics: immigration, federal-parliament, federal-government, hurstville-2220, australia