The 1973 Migrant Workers’ Conference and Histories of Multiculturalism

Nowhere is the alliance between leftist organisations, trade unions, migrant workers’ clubs and ethnic welfare societies better represented than in the migrant workers’ conferences held in 1973 and 1975. This article argues for the historic importance of these overlooked moments in the history of twentieth-century labour migration. It explores the inter-ethnic and social justice aims of grassroots multiculturalism in Australia – a model that has been lost in subsequent official renderings of multiculturalism. What was the social and political position of non-Anglo migrant labourers and the migrant rights activists representing their interests? How did they engage with the labour movement and the Far Left? What political alliances formed around this question of migrant labour and migrant welfare for ethnic minority workers? And what were the outcomes of these conferences? This article will explore the improbable alliances and tensions that formed the migrant rights movement in the early 1970s; track its fracturing after the mid-1970s, when economic crises rendered its more ambitious redistributive aims unachievable; and examine how the ideological direction of state-endorsed multiculturalism diverted its inter-ethnic social justice agenda.