Life & Wisdom Quote by Hugh Mackay

The line is a confession that tries not to sound like one. “I wish we didn’t have to own up to” signals a speaker who knows the moral ledger is overdue, but also knows how political systems survive: by keeping culpability diffuse. It’s not “I oppose this policy” or even “we should change it.” It’s a lament about accountability itself, as if the most painful part is being forced to admit what’s been done in our name.

Mackay’s key move is the phrase “deliberately designed.” That strips away the comforting myths that cruelty is an accident, a bureaucratic glitch, an unfortunate side effect of “border management.” He frames suffering as the mechanism, not the collateral damage. The target isn’t just a policy outcome; it’s the architecture of deterrence politics, where pain is used as a billboard: don’t come here.

The clause “people who have already been traumatised” refuses the abstraction that often makes hardline immigration regimes palatable. It re-humanizes those reduced to categories like “illegal arrivals” or “boat people,” and it does so with a psychological realism Mackay is known for: trauma doesn’t reset at the border; it compounds.

Subtextually, the “we” implicates a whole society. This isn’t only about politicians or agencies. It’s about voters, media narratives, and the national self-image that insists on decency while outsourcing brutality. The quote works because it stages that clash in a single breath: the desire to feel humane versus the evidence that our systems are intentionally not.