The White Australia policy ended in 1973 when the Whitlam government finally dismantled it. Before that, racially restrictive immigration was Australian law: dictation tests, exclusion zones, the entire architecture of a white-only nation. Whitlam took office in December 1972 and within months it was gone. That was the moment Australia stopped being officially racist about who got in.
The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act stayed on the books for decades, but the actual racial bar was unwound across multiple governments long before Whitlam. Holt's Liberal government in 1966 removed the requirement that non-European migrants prove they were '50 percent European,' and from that point on the formal race-based test in immigration law was over. Earlier, in 1949, Chifley's Labour government allowed Japanese war brides to settle. In 1956, residency was opened to non-Europeans on the same terms as Europeans. The 1973 Whitlam-era reforms were genuinely important: they removed the last race-conscious language from the Migration Act and explicitly disconnected migration policy from any concept of race or national origin. They were a tidy-up rather than the demolition. The Australian story 'we ended White Australia in 1973' compresses about 25 years of incremental reform into a single sound bite, and it gives one government credit for changes seven prime ministers had a hand in. Worth knowing if you ever say it at a barbecue.