Dr Tim Soutphommasane knows what it is like to be racially vilified.

"It's very confronting, I've experienced racial abuse on a number of occasions but the feeling is always the same," he told Jane Hutcheon on One Plus One.

"Your heart rate goes up immediately, you do have this fight or flight body response to it and you're really wired up for quite a few hours after the fact, I find.

"It does make you feel like a smaller person, it can go to the core of your being."

The Race Discrimination Commissioner was born in France after his parents fled communist Laos.

They migrated to Australia when he was three years old and settled in south-western Sydney.

Dr Soutphommasane said his parents always spoke of where they came from, which gave him a strong sense of identity.

"My mother would always tell me stories about her home city, in particular the family home and where she grew up. I also grew up knowing that my father was ethnically Chinese.

"I had a childhood where a sense of identity was always very strongly passed on to me."

Brought up in the suburbs around Cabramatta, being of a different heritage was noticed, but not unusual.

"It was eased a little by the fact that when I went to primary school I was in a school where the majority of the students would have come from a migrant background," he said.

"So I would have been around kids from the former Yugoslavia, from Vietnam, China, Cambodia. So difference was part of everyday life at Canley Vale Public School."

It was not until he reached high school that Dr Soutphommasane felt different.

"I'd gone from a school where I was in the majority I suppose of being from a minority background, to being one of only a handful of boys from an east Asian or south-east Asian background."

The prejudice in these years he said, was more subtle.

"For example, we'd be talking in our agriculture class about exports to Asia and there'd be some remarks about Asians here or there.

"It would come up through the conversations that other kids would have, including with me, about the rise of Pauline Hanson at the time, her One Nation party and her calls for Asian immigration to be stopped or multiculturalism to be abolished.

"It would occur occasionally when you'd walk through the quad and someone would say something in earshot."

Sorry, this video has expired Tim Soutphommasane on racial abuse ( Jane Hutcheon )

Despite the occasional jeering, school for the most part was enjoyable.

And it was here that a speech by a fellow student started him on a search for identity, that led him to question what it really means to be Australian.

"At one of the Anzac ceremonies there was a fellow student that was reflecting on all this and she said, 'Today we pause to reflect on the sacrifices made by our forebears, so that we could enjoy the Australian way of life'.

"Her words really jarred with me. I looked at her and I looked at myself. She was someone of Vietnamese background talking about her forebears and I started thinking about where her forebears would have been in 1914 and 1915 and where my forebears would have been at that time.

"That really prompted me to think for the first time, how do I make sense of being an Australian, an Australian citizen of a cultural background that would have been excluded for many years in the history of Australian federation."

Creating a tolerant Australia

National identity, for Dr Soutphommasane, is more than just lifestyle.

"Quite often we will think of Australia in terms of a love of the beach, the sun and the surf, or a liking for barbeques, but if we define our country in terms of lifestyle then it's really only a superficial connection that we might have to a country," he reflects.

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"If you think about what sets Australians apart from others, I would point to things like a very instinctive belief in equality or egalitarianism and a very strong sense of fairness as well, encapsulated in our belief of the fair go.

"These things find expression in all sorts of ways but they are reflected in the way that we treat people every day.

"The fact that we don't tend to call people by their titles, but rather by their first name. The fact that we will hop in to the front seat of a taxi rather than sit in the back.

"These are all very subtle but powerful expressions of our informality, our belief in equality and in my view a certain Australian character and identity."

Already halfway through his five-year appointment as Race Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Soutphommasane wants to achieve a generational change in Australia's attitude toward race.

He wants to create a more tolerant Australia, by educating people on the way they treat and interact with others. He believes this will in turn change our thoughts and attitudes.

"For me this job is about education, and about educating and persuading people about the better angels of our nature.

"All too often we can take pride in our multicultural achievement and forget that there remains some way to go before we can achieve racial equality."

For the full interview with Jane Hutcheon watch One Plus One at 10:00am on Friday on ABC TV and 5:30pm EDT on Saturday on ABC News 24.