Bonegilla

High rates of immigration at present aren't helping.

If I make a historical comparison drawing from my book and think about the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s, initially those people had to spend three months, six months, sometimes a couple of years living in hostels, most famously Bonegilla in Northern Victoria.

Or if they were sponsored by their families, as many of them were, they had to shack up with their families in their houses.

They did not take houses quickly then.

Between 1947 and 1952, Australia received just over 170,000 people through the Displaced Persons scheme.

[upbeat music] At Bonegilla, near Albury, they're making new Australians.

840 people from the Baltic states are going to school here, for Australia's migration policy has determined that never again shall our new citizens be forced to fend for themselves.

Australia needed more workers.

Furthermore, migrants will not make a shortage of jobs.

They will make more jobs.

When he first came to Australia, Ilmar Tammelo was in the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Center, and he did mandatory labor.

He was a forestry worker, and he also worked at a few other places in regional New South Wales.