I remember vividly being eight years old. My father was sitting beside the small fountain in our garden at the front of our home in suburban Adelaide. He was cleaning it with such care.

My father had migrated from Italy at the age of 15 after the war. A teenager cycled past shouting a word at him insinuating migrants didn’t belong here.

I didn’t know the word’s meaning, but I turned to look at my dad. He stopped. Just for a moment. There were tears in his eyes. Then he returned to cleaning the fountain.

Decades later, I stood in my driveway with my daughter when a young adult walking past did the same thing to her. Same method. Different face. A word used to remind her she didn’t belong. In her own driveway. Her own country.

While us-versus-them thinking is complex, political psychologist Karen Stenner’s research and that of others shows that uncertainty, not hatred, is often one of the primary triggers. When people feel the world is out of control, the instinct to find someone to blame becomes almost automatic. But uncertainty doesn’t work alone.

Economic threat, the feeling of lost status, and the sense that your culture and way of life are disappearing, all deepen that hate instinct. Together they create conditions that make scapegoating not just possible, but predictable. It is a stress response. In the wrong hands, it is a weapon.

Listen to the language embedded in Australian political discourse: Swamped, invasion, our way of life, they. These are not policy words. They are fear words, chosen to make the circle of who counts as Australian as small as possible.

When politicians reach for this rhetoric to chase votes, they don’t just reflect fear, they manufacture it, without evidence. There........

© The New Daily