The Northern Australian Workers Union (NAWU)

For quite some time the NAWU supported the White Australia Policy.

It’s an open secret that nobody liked the Chinese, not even that great melting pot America:

On anti-Chinese immigration in USA:  Justice Harlan, in Plessy v Ferguson 1896, said Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens…[but]  There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.”

Just as the USA had restricted Chinese immigration, Australia sought to keep the Chinese out of Australia.

There were massacres of Chinese diggers on the goldfields. 

*Contemporary accounts show reasons the rest of the population's attitudes to the Chinese were negative include:

• Opium smoking was widespread [and some Europeans became addicted];
• Drinking;
• Gambling;
• Brazenly offering to sell 'disgusting and filthy' pictures to Europeans;
• Spread diseases such as leprosy [e.g. 27 cases in the Bendigo area];
• Wasting water/ refusing other diggers access to water;
• Unwillingness to convert to Christianity;
• It was very rare for Chinese men to bring women with them.

Until the mid 20th Century, wowsers fought a long and dogged campaign to enforce their strict, pure, Christian standards on the rest of the European community. The opium smoking, drinking and gambling were not just degenerate vices, along with plain bad luck on the diggings these vices left many Chinese without the money they needed to survive and were believed to encourage all kinds of thievery and trickery.
Opium dens brought about the downfall of far too many European women. The shortage of Chinese women no doubt exacerbated this effect, but shortages of women had long been a problem in the Australian colonies so jealousy may have been an added factor in the undercurrent of mistrust.

One report in The Argus newspaper said
'... that all the vices which have been noticed are those which must be expected to flourish among a population composed wholly of males. The history of some of the Australian colonies, cursed with convictism, in which not the least evil was the disproportion of the sexes speaks eloquent of the social and moral plagues which such a state of things brings.'
[Readers should read into this what they will!]

An important idea - restated by Pauline Hanson in Parliament in 1996 - was the danger that Australia would be swamped by Asians. The principle objection in both eras is not to differences of race per se, but to the perceived unwillingness of newcomers to assimilate. In the 1850s more than in the 1990s this was obviously the case, the threat of separatism was that Europeans now settled in Australia, who had found a country with values that suited them, might lose that type and quality of life. Unable or unwilling to adopt Chinese values and their way of life, they might ultimately have to migrate from Australia .*

Away from the goldfields, many Chinese stayed and succeeded by managing to merge into the background.

Despite their willingness to treat Aboriginals as outsiders, the Union had long been aware of how badly Aboriginal stockmen and other pastoral workers were exploited.

In 1932 one member of the NAWU said of the conditions Aboriginals worked in on stations,

“A slave owner would not allow his slave to be decimated by preventable disease and starvation the same as these people are in the country or bush. If there is no slavery in the British Empire then the Northern Territory is not part of the British Empire, for it certainly exists here in its worst form.”

Despite this acknowledgement of Aboriginal reality, the Union had boycotted business owners in the past for hiring Aboriginals – not because of their colour but because of the threat to white jobs and wages.

This threat had been exacerbated by the depression of the 1930s when a large number of white men were unable to find work while Aboriginals, at least, were guaranteed rations.

The union was also worried because Aboriginal stockmen far outnumbered white workers in the Territory, and it would be impossible to visit hundreds of stations to sign them all up as union members.

Communication would be a problem, and there was a risk station owners might exert an undue influence on Aboriginal members.

After World War II the Union changed its position and worked with Aboriginals towards having the laws relating to Aboriginals changed.
Although the Union initially resisted the idea of equal pay for Aboriginal workers, by 1948 they had a change of heart – only to be told the Arbitration Commission had no power to act on Aboriginal rates of pay in the Northern Territory.