Bob Hawke did not consult the cabinet before making his famous, tearful promise to allow Chinese students to stay in Australia after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Speaking to Guardian Australia, Hawke said that when he announced the decision he had just seen a cable from the embassy setting out in graphic detail what had happened on 4 June 1989.

“I have a deep love for the Chinese people,” Hawke said. “I had no consultation with anyone and when I walked off the dais [after the announcement], I was told: ‘You cannot do that, prime minister.’ I said to them, ‘I just did. It is done.’ ”

The 1988-89 cabinet documents, released by the National Archives, show substantial resistance to the decision by several government departments, including immigration, the Treasury and finance. Departments warned of negative consequences for the budget, the migration program and the labour market.

At the same time, Australia was in the midst of a heated debate about the rate of Asian immigration, fuelled by comments by the historian Geoffrey Blainey, the then opposition leader John Howard, and by the FitzGerald report on immigration.

John Harding-Easson (@JHEasson) Bob Hawke’s speech in the aftermath of Tiananmen is one of the most compelling examples of raw and empathetic leadership. Seems bygone in Australia today pic.twitter.com/pigTepABgQ

But Hawke pushed through the debate and, three days before the Tiananmen Square massacre, took a submission to cabinet for a “multicultural agenda”, which expanded SBS, established English as the national language and urged immigrants to take up citizenship. It was designed, he said, to reassure the wider community as well as ethnic communities of the benefits of multiculturalism.

He noted in that submission that in 1989 one in five Australians were either born in a non-English-speaking country, or had a parent born in one. Less than half were of solely of Anglo-Celtic descent.

Hawke’s commitment to a multicultural Australia was well established by the time of the events of Tiananmen Square.

On 16 June 1989, 12 days after Chinese police fired on civilian protesters, Hawke surprised his colleagues by making an emotional announcement which extended all temporary entry permits for Chinese nationals legally in Australia for 12 months, with work rights and financial assistance.

Bob Hawke cries as he talks about Tiananmen Square massacre. Photograph: ABC

It took almost a month for a submission to go to cabinet examining the political, social and financial ramifications of Hawke’s decision, which initially affected 16,200 students from the People’s Republic of China. Despite the ramifications, Hawke stood his ground and eventually 42,000 were granted permanent visas.

Ross Garnaut, a former ambassador to China and former economic adviser to Hawke, told Guardian Australia the Chinese students had turned out to be an asset to Australia and likened their collective contribution to the Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany.

“They are generally seen to have made a very positive contribution, a huge contribution to the arts, academic and business fields, comparable to the refugees who came here from Nazi Germany,” Garnaut said.

At the time, the immigration department and its minister were worried the Tiananmen events would change the mix of applications towards onshore refugees – a concern still reflected in government policy over the arrival of asylum seekers by boat. The department was also suspicious of the use of intensive English courses to “sidestep” entry requirements.

According to the submission, there were 16,200 Chinese nationals in the country at the time, 7,200 of whom had overstayed. Of the total, 11,400 were students, 78% of whom were intensive English students. A further 1,500 students had visas and had planned to travel to Australia, and 22,000 had paid visa fees and bonds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bloodied protester walks through troops in Tiananmen Square. Photograph: Jacques Langevin/Corbis Sygma

Ray’s submission highlighted a tension between controlling the numbers of intensive English students from China and the income they generated from full-fee courses.

He argued that when the immigration department tried to introduce tougher entry tests for short course English language students, the Department of Education, Employment and Training argued the approach would cut the number of students “and therefore export income”.

John Dawkins was a cabinet minister at the time and said the safety of the students was discussed in cabinet, as well as the potential injection of “a bit of quick intellectual improvement” into Australia’s skills base.

“A lot of these people were very capable bright students and we thought if they wanted to stay, they could make a great contribution to the country, as many of them have,” Dawkins told Guardian Australia.

Asked whether he made the decision with an eye to increasing the skills base in Australia, Hawke said that consideration had nothing to do with it. “I wasn’t thinking of any of that at the time,” Hawke told Guardian Australia. “It’s called leadership.”

The decision was important to the development of Australia, according to James Jupp, an adjunct associate professor at the Australian National Univrsity’s demographic and social research institute.

“It really broke the back of remaining support for white Australia,” Jupp said. “It brought in very productive, hardworking and keen people, creating a whole new middle class, which is a good thing because the old middle class was getting a bit musty and limited.

“I think it was a wise decision and historians will see it as a very important decision.”

Three years later, in 1992, the Keating government introduced mandatory detention for unauthorised arrivals.