What was the reaction of Australia when the Vietnamese refugees landed?
Events resulting from the Vietnam War led many people in Cambodia, Laos, and especially Vietnam to become refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the fall of Saigon. In Vietnam, the new communist government sent many people who supported the old government in the South to “re-education camps”, and others to “new economic zones.” An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials. According to published academic studies in the United States and Europe, 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s re-education camps. Thousands were abused or tortured.These factors, coupled with poverty and the total destruction of the country that happened during the Vietnam war, caused hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee the country. —————— In Australia, the Fraser Government took what might be considered the final step in ending the White Australia policy by letting more than 100,000 Indochinese refugees to immigrate at a quick pace.
