Warnings about immigration echo almost word for word the fears once directed at post-war arrivals – fears history has already discredited.

Newspapers and politicians say the current wave of immigration is “testing our assimilative powers”. The government must adopt a “more selective intake”. Recent arrivals are incapable of adopting our values. Some are “uncivilized”; “like animals.” The vast majority, at least according to one journalist, speak no English. They are a security risk, an economic liability, and a threat to our way of life. The “massive influx” must stop.

But of course this is not Australia in the 2020s. This was Australia in the 1940s, and the animus was directed at southern Europeans, and Jews. We wanted “more Australian babies” (sound familiar?) and more British migrants. At a pinch, the ‘Balts’ would do – at least they were blonde-haired and blue-eyed. As for the rest: too many, too foreign, and not white enough.

We know what happened next. Displaced persons, refugees, and immigrants were the catalyst that allowed Australia to emerge from its long cocoon. They became leaders in research, in the sciences, in the arts. They helped design the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and then they built it with their bare hands. Along the way, and in their less than lavish free time, they were instrumental in developing Australia’s ski-fields, including setting up the first tow-bars and the first ski lodges.

It’s a tiny thing, granted, but worth dwelling on because it shows that the flow-on benefits of immigration go well beyond the expected return on investment. For additional examples, consider the zucchini, the laksa, and the flat white.

So in his latest intervention on the subject of immigration, Angus Taylor is 100 per cent right to remind us of the achievements of his grandfather, William Hudson, first commissioner of the Snowy Mountains scheme. With technical staff in short supply, Hudson found the workers he needed in the refugee camps of Europe and brought them to Australia. Two-thirds of all the workers on the Snowy came from overseas. He looked after them and ensured that they were treated with care and compassion. The results of that care and compassion are everywhere around us.

Taylor cites this as an example of good immigration policy, which it was, but he ignores the fact that the grandfather’s workforce was subject to exactly the same fear campaigns that the grandson is seeking to stoke now.

Many of the men and women who arrived in Australia after the war were highly educated – though this did not prevent them suffering all manner of racial abuse. On the other hand, many did not speak English; for some of them it remained a struggle throughout their lives. That was not out of wilful hostility. Coming to Australia, where they didn’t know the language or the culture, was a sacrifice they made in order to give themselves and more importantly their children the opportunity of a better and a safer life. This sacrifice was painful but necessary for the betterment of the next generation – not just their children, but the next generation of Australians, too. It still is.

When Angus Taylor chooses to recycle the anxieties of the 1940s, he is not celebrating his grandfather’s legacy. He is betraying it. Sir William was capable of looking past the stereotypes and the neuroses of an insular society, and to understand the long-term potential that immigrants offered this country. Taylor refuses to do so. More than that, he is insulting millions of Australians whose own parents’ and grandparents’ struggles deserve more than this casual dismissal.

(Quotes about post-war Australian immigration policy drawn from the pages of Smith’s Weekly, 1947-48.)