Tim Watts is the product of six generations of graziers, Anzacs and pilots who could have come from the pages of Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, the 1950s book that distilled the mythical characteristics of the early white nation.

The Labor MP for Gellibrand grew up on the Darling Downs in Queensland where his ancestor John Watts was one of the first colonisers. After managing a section of land on that rich black soil, John became its first MP in the Queensland parliament in 1859.

Another Watts ancestor, Charles Nantes, was a member of the anti-Chinese league in Geelong, which pressured the Victorian government to impose a poll tax on all Chinese passengers landing there, forcing them to South Australia and to walk to the Victorian goldfields.

In telling that history to his own children, Tim pulled a thread that led to his new book, The Golden Country, Australia’s Changing Identity. His children are Eurasian and his wife migrated from Hong Kong right about the time John Howard was suggesting Asian migration should be “slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb [was] greater”.

The heart of the book is an attempt to reconcile the two foundations of his immediate family, wrapped in a portion of Australian history that many would rather forget.

Watts acknowledges that “this was a mad book to write” but was struck by the idea that his children may not experience his own childhood feeling of “unalloyed love” for Australia simply as a result of their own identity.

“Those Australian values of mateship, egalitarianism and a fair go, irreverence – I think they are still really powerful values,” he says. “The reality is, though, that I think they have been denied to many people in our country over time.

“In a time where Asian Australians … comprise some 12-13% of the population, bigger than the African American community in the US ... we really ought to have a conversation about the way that community has been treated in our country.”

The Golden Country charts the Chinese Australian experience from the gold rush and the formation of the White Australia policy. It outlines the contradictions under the Howard government, which presided over the spike in immigration that produced Watts’s own diverse electorate, where more than half of his constituents were born overseas or have a parent born overseas.

And it travels to the present where he describes a securitised immigration policy more focused on keeping people out than embracing migrants for nation building to bring people together.

Labor MP Tim Watts speaks on the Migration Legislation amendment bill, Wednesday 9 November 2016. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

“Howard had this view that Australian identity was carved in stone by Sir Henry Parkes and passed on down to us via Charles Bean and Don Bradman, but with 100 years of defining Australians through the exclusion of Asian Australians, we have to talk about what it means to be Australian again today,” Watts said.

Watts argues Howard’s “culture wars” on race and identity burned the progressive side of politics but, in order to talk about identity, Australians need to know their history.

“If we deny our history, we can’t understand the way we have grown to be the country we are today,” Watts said. “In denying that history, really it denies the greatest achievement of Australia over the last century, which is outgrowing those beginnings.”

In outlining the Australian story, Watts quotes Australia’s first two prime ministers, Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin, among many early politicians who were united on one thing – the need to grow a white nation above all else.

He suggests while other countries such as the United States, Canada and New Zealand have had racially exclusionary immigration laws, Australia’s crafting of the White Australia policy became fundamentally entangled with our notion of self.

“Our bad luck was for the rise in racially exclusionary thinking and lawmaking to happen at our moment of federation, when we were working out what it meant to be Australian,” Watts said.

One of the leading young intellectuals of the Labor party, Watts seeks to re-imagine Australian identity for the modern age – the reality rather than the legend. He also urges a more open debate on identity.

“My hypothesis is that Australian legend, that symbology, that idea that what it was to be Australian was to be a white man on the land, was just so powerful in our Australian identity it shaped everything,” Watts says.

“We haven’t had a more powerful symbol, a more powerful iconography to come along and replace it. Some people say, well, it’s multiculturalism, it’s a civic democracy. That’s what unites us, our belief in democracy, our belief in multiculturalism. Well that just doesn’t have the guts to unite the country. We can’t be a nation of difference respecters. It doesn’t bring a people together.”

The context for the discussion on Australian identity is tricky. But then it always is. This book could have been expected to land under a Shorten Labor government, and provide a foundation for new open but honest debate about what Australia is and what it could be.

Instead, commentators and historians are still dissecting the Coalition win and what it means. At the same time, Australia is agonising over global tensions between China and the United States, made even more complex by anxiety over foreign interference.

The last week of parliament, for example, was dominated by the controversy around Gladys Liu, the new MP for Chisholm and first Chinese Australian woman elected to the House of Representatives.

Prime minister Scott Morrison and treasurer Josh Frydenberg with member for Chisholm Gladys Liu. Photograph: Lukas Coch/EPA

Liu came under fire from Labor for an interview in which she refused to criticise the Chinese Communist party on the South China Sea and could not recall whether she had been a member of CCP propaganda organisations. Scott Morrison accused Labor of “casting a smear on Chinese Australians”.

Watts said the controversy again highlighted both a lack of adequate representation of Asian Australians in the parliament and the press gallery. He said Australia must get better at dealing with both structural racism and the threat of foreign interference without conflating the two.

“Structural racism will be with us for a while,” he said. “The threat of foreign interference will be with us for a while. We have to be able to talk about both of these issues without conflating them and damaging our approach to the other one.

“I look back at the last week of parliament and think how different would that debate have been if we had had 30 Asian Australians across the House of Reps and the Senate, if we had had 20 plus Asian Australians in the press gallery.

“The narrowness of our representation increases the stakes of this in a way that is very unfair. Look, Gladys Liu should not be the representative of the Australian Chinese community and it was extremely foolish and unfair of the prime minister to make her one.”

Watts is optimistic about Australia’s future and believes if Australia could embrace a more updated inclusive identity, the country could position itself for the future.

The Golden Country, by Tim Watts.

“If we could utilise the talents in our own nation at the cusp of the Asian century, at the edge of an Asian region, which is centre of the geostrategic contest of our time, the centre of economic growth of our time, if we could combine this incredibly diverse, young, talented population with the open liberal institutions that we have, we would be in the box seat in this nation.”

He looks to the power of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which he writes “seems like an articulation of the Golden Country that we could become. Whereas three stories make Australia: the Ancient Indigenous Heritage which is its foundation, the British Institutions built upon it and the adorning Gift of Multicultural Migration. Three stories make us one: Australians.”

The Golden Country – Australia’s Changing Identity, by Tim Watts is published by Text Publishing, $32.99.