In this very well drawn racist cartoon from The Bulletin 1888, Victoria's Premier Duncan Gillies tips a barrel of "chow" rubbish onto the New South Wales garden of Premier Henry Parkes...

Quite funnily these two characters were born in the United Kingdom. Who knows if they rescinded their Pom nationality? They did not have to, the constitution was only declared in 1901. Parkes was born in Coventry, where the population of Pakistanis is now bigger than that of white English people. 

Gillies was born in Scotland, migrated and worked in the Australian gold fields first as a miner then as a businessman. 

we are told by history books and wikipedia now that:

In both the first (1880) and second (1883–86) Service governments Gillies was Commissioner for Railways and Vice-President of the Board of Lands and Works. He was also Minister for Public Instruction 1884–86. When Service retired at the time of the 1886 elections, Gillies succeeded him as Premier, forming a coalition government with the liberal leader Alfred Deakin, and winning a comfortable majority over a divided opposition at the elections.

The Gillies ministry presided over the climax of the long economic boom which Victoria had enjoyed since the gold rushes of the 1850s. There was at this time no regulation of the banking and finance industries, and no expectation that governments could or should protect investors against unsound or unscrupulous financial schemes. The result was the great Victorian Land Boom, which took off in 1887 and reached a climax in 1890. More than 50 million pounds of speculative capital from Britain flowed into the colony, much of which was spent buying land in suburban Melbourne at hugely inflated prices. Gillies was not really responsible for this, although his government did nothing to prevent it.

Meanwhile Parkes, the "father of federation" was ... relieved of his heavy work on the Empire, which was continued in other hands, Parkes stood for parliament and was elected for East Sydney on 10 June 1859. He stood as an independent candidate but in the list of candidates elected he was described by the Sydney Morning Herald as a "radical". He was generally in favour of Sir John Robertson's land policy, of the extension of education, and of free trade. He was not a bigoted freetrader as he was as strongly in favour of developing manufactures as he was of encouraging agriculture. He was a strong supporter of free trade, immigration programmes and education reforms. He introduced laws that gave the Government the power to employ teachers and create public schools, abolished government funding to religious schools and improved prisons.

Parkes also believed in immigration, and his well-known powers as an orator led to his being sent to England with W. B. Dalley as commissioners of emigration at a salary of £1000 a year each in May 1861. Parkes left his wife and five, soon to become six, children in poverty, on a rented farm at Werrington.[2] Their duties were confined to diffusing information, and Parkes spoke at about 60 meetings at towns in the west and north of England and in Scotland. He felt that he had done good work, but it was difficult to say how much effect his words had. During the 14 months he was in England he met many interesting people, and became in particular friendly with Carlyle and his wife. He returned to Australia in January 1863.

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Here we can see the importance of this cartoon. The Chinese (Chows) had been at the tail end of the tailings of gold mining in Victoria. When the recession then depression hit Victoria, the Chinese became "unemployed" and Gillies had the idea to send them to New South Wales, where Parkes was in favour of immigration, but who knows if he liked the Chinese at this level. 

And we still get the same resistance dynamics in our immigration policies.