# White Australia Policy The **White Australia Policy** was the body of law and practice restricting non-white immigration to Australia for most of the twentieth century. Its foundation was the **Immigration Restriction Act 1901** — among the first statutes passed by the newly federated Commonwealth, which is the fact that matters: the country wrote racial exclusion into its founding legislative program rather than acquiring it later. ## The dictation test Its central instrument was procedural rather than explicit. Migrants could be required to write **50 words** in a European language as dictated by an immigration officer; after **1905** the officer could choose **any** language at all. A prospective migrant could therefore be failed in a language neither they nor anyone in the room spoke. This is the mechanism worth carrying forward. The statute never named a race. It delegated an unreviewable discretion to a frontline official and let the outcome do what the text would not say — a design the vault encounters repeatedly in modern immigration and voting administration. ## Dismantling It ended in stages, not at once: the dictation test was abolished in **1958**; alien-registration provisions persisted into the early 1970s; the Whitlam government formally abolished the policy in **1973**; and the **Racial Discrimination Act 1975** removed the last traces. ## See Also - [[Australia]] - [[Australian History Hub]] - [[Pauline Hanson]] - [[Nativism]]