Racism in Australia traces both historical and contemporary racist community attitudes and incidents in Australia. Contemporary Australia is the product of multiple waves of immigration, predominantly from Great Britain and Ireland.
Laws forbid racial and other forms of discrimination and protect freedom of religion.[1][2] Demographic analysis indicates a high level of inter-ethnic marriage: according to the Australian Census, a majority of Indigenous Australians partnered with non-indigenous Australians, and a majority of third-generation Australians of non-English-speaking background had partnered with persons of different ethnic origin (the majority partnered with persons of Australian or Anglo-Celtic background, which constitutes the majority ethnic grouping in Australia).[3] In 2009, about 25.6 per cent of the estimated resident population of Australia comprised those born overseas.[4]
Indigenous peoples of Australia, who had lived in Australia for at least 40,000 years before the arrival of British settlers in 1788, were dispossessed from their land in 1788 by Britain, which claimed Eastern Australia as its own on the basis of the
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Legislation including the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the Commonwealth Racial Hatred Act (1995) and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act (1986) outlaw racial discrimination in the public sphere in Australia. In recent decades, anti-immigration political parties like the One Nation Party have received extensive media coverage, but only marginal electoral support and successive governments have maintained large, multiethnic programs of immigration. As in other Western nations, tensions in the aftermath of events like the September 11 attacks and Bali Bombing by radical Islamists contributed to strained ethnic relations in some Australian