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1901 immigration restrction act was aimed at excluding non-white migrants, and did so by requiring migrants to pass a dictation test which could be set in any language chosen by a customs officer.
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WWII resulted in a sense Australia needed to increase it's poplation in order to be able to adequately defend the country - the concept of "populate or perish". Skill shortages were also a key issue during this perioud of migration, and attracting skilled workers was an important migration goal.
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Australian immigration policy became more open to non-European migration from around the mid 1960s onwards, but non-European migrants did not really start to arrive in large numbers untill the early 1970s.
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two of the major shifts in migration policy since the mid-1990s have been an encreasing emphisis on skilled migration, particularly into high priority occupations.