Will Angus Taylor look to his grandfather for guidance on immigration?

When Angus Taylor delivered his first speech to parliament in December 2013, he devoted part of it to the memory of Sir William Hudson.

Unsurprising, really. Hudson remains a giant of 20th-century Australian history.

He was credited with building Australia’s single greatest infrastructure project, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, of which he was commissioner and chief engineer from its inception in 1949 until 1967.

He was also Taylor’s grandfather.

“My grandfather William Hudson was, and remains, a pervasive role model in my life,” Taylor, the newly minted parliamentarian, told the House of Representatives.

“He conceived of the idea [the Snowy Mountains scheme] and insisted, against resistance, to bring in large numbers of refugees from war-torn Europe.

“He insisted that people from over 30 countries, who had just been fighting each other in the Second World War, live and work together in multi-ethnic camps.

“The Snowy scheme, quite literally, changed the face of our nation.”

These years later, Taylor is the new leader of a federal Coalition gasping for relevance as disaffected voters fall for the easy, right-wing populism of Pauline Hanson and her followers.

Taylor has flagged his priority is to take a hardline stance on immigration, including supporting measures to block or expel people “who hate our way of life”.

Sussan Ley left him to mull over an as-yet untried scheme to ban arrivals from certain troubled areas of the world, including countries in Africa and the Middle East, and, for pity’s sake, Gaza. Oh, and border control would have the Trumpist power to check the mobile phones of arrivals.

Precisely what cuts to Australia’s immigration numbers Taylor might deem suitable, or whether he might ban applicants from specific countries, is yet to be revealed.

More intriguingly, perhaps, is the open question of how Taylor might square his reverence for his grandfather’s life’s work with his determination to exploit a rise in anti-immigration sentiment for his and his party’s political survival.

Grandfather Bill Hudson’s Australia in 1949 was, of course, a different place to the nation we inhabit now.

World War II had shaken Australians’ belief in their nation’s security.

“Populate or perish” was the cry of a country of fewer than 8 million.

The vast majority of Australians – about 90 per cent – were of Anglo-Celtic heritage, and the White Australia Policy was an article of faith.

The Australian census of 1947 identified just 38,653 Australians as “foreign” (the census papers also declared all numbers were “exclusive of full-blood Aboriginals”).

Xenophobia, like institutionalised racism, ran deep.

When Ben Chifley’s Labor government first decided to broaden Australia’s intake of postwar immigrants to include Europeans in the cause of the “populate or perish” policy, immigration agents took ham-fisted care to assuage public unease about “foreigners”.

They carefully chose light-skinned, often blond, men and women, most of them from the Baltic nations: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

It worked: journalists witnessing the first immigrants travelling by train from Port Melbourne to the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre near Albury-Wodonga enthusiastically called them “the beautiful Balts”.

Still, wharfies at Port Melbourne in late 1947 were reluctant to dock the first ship carrying these new arrivals, claiming they would “take Australian jobs”.

When Hudson was appointed in 1949 by the Chifley government to build the massive Snowy scheme – to divert water from the mountains to irrigate the nation’s food bowl and produce reliable hydroelectric power – he knew there were nowhere near enough Australians capable or willing to tackle the work.

He chose to upend Australia’s monoculture.

Hudson settled for the bulk of his workforce on the great pool of Europeans whose lives were shattered by World War II.

Displaced persons’ camps overflowed with refugees. Poverty and hopelessness had its grip on villages, smashed cities and ruined agricultural regions across the continent.

Many of the people Hudson and his people persuaded to take their chances in far-off Australia had also been at each other’s throats during the war, and sometimes long before.

Germany, having invaded Poland, waged war everywhere; Italians were drafted into Mussolini’s Fascist fever until they turned on him and killed him; Greece was occupied by Italians, Germans, Bulgarians and Hungarians; ancient hatreds divided Serbs and Croats. After the war, Stalin’s Soviet empire swallowed the countries of Eastern Europe, leading to a frantic exodus.

Hudson’s scheme employed people – almost all of them men – from 33 of these broken nations.

Few spoke English or even shared languages with their former European neighbours.

There could easily have been a backlash from everyday Australians and hysteria over importing enemy aliens that would make One Nation’s stance today look tame.

But Hudson had an ace up his sleeve.

He had the full support of Australia’s political leaders from both sides of the fence: Chifley initially, and the Liberals’ Bob Menzies through the 1950s and ’60s.

They lauded immigration and the Snowy scheme as nation-building, and a potentially sceptical public went along with it.

The likes of Pauline Hanson wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways.

Now, Hudson’s grandson has a choice.

He could choose to embrace a non-discriminatory immigration policy while promoting a perfectly legitimate and overdue debate about how many immigrants Australia should welcome.

He could temper the wilder fears promoted by cynical populists by pointing to nation-builders like rural doctors from the Middle East, aged care workers from Asia, technologists from the subcontinent and the army of recent arrivals who undertake unheralded and often unpleasant tasks in the cause of building a future for their kids.

Or he could buckle to those in his party who are terrified of the racists and xenophobes intent on exploiting the concerns of everyday Australians who are abandoning mainstream political parties because they feel leaders aren’t speaking to them any more.