For decades now, public discourse about refugees and immigrants has become increasingly fractured, ugly and untrue.

From John Howard’s “we will decide who comes to this country” mantra, to Kevin Rudd’s “if you come by boat you will never permanently live in Australia” in 2013, through to Tony Abbott’s “stop the boats” election victory that same year, it has been a prominent feature of Australia’s recent political landscape.

For the Coalition, it was about stopping so-called “illegals”.

For Labor, it was framed as “saving lives at sea”.

For both, it was about keeping people seeking asylum out of contact with the Australian community, demonised and dehumanised, called by numbers, not names.

Against this backdrop, it’s perhaps unsurprising Australians turned out in the thousands to rally against immigration this weekend. It could be seen as the culmination of years of MPs using immigration issues for short-term political gain.

But just as government messaging has partly contributed to this situation, it could also help get us out of it.

Political language about immigration wasn’t always so negative.

At the end of the second world war, then-Prime Minister Ben Chifley welcomed 170,000 refugees and other displaced people from Europe.

In the 1970s, when the first boats of Vietnamese asylum seekers arrived in Australia’s north, Prime........

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