Life & Wisdom Quote by Hugh Mackay

The sting here is in the gap between national self-image and national behavior. Mackay opens with “total sympathy,” a soft landing that signals moral alignment with Dick Smith while also borrowing Smith’s public credibility. Then he pivots: “I only wish there were grounds...” It’s a wish phrased as a rebuke. The sentence performs disappointment as a civic diagnosis, implying the evidence is already in and it’s damning: there aren’t grounds, because Australians have, in fact, tolerated it.

That word “tolerate” does heavy cultural work. Mackay isn’t accusing every individual of cruelty; he’s indicting the ambient permission structure - the way democracies outsource violence to bureaucracy and distance. Refugee policy becomes something administered, normalized, rationalized, and therefore survivable to the public conscience. “Such appalling treatment” is deliberately unspecific, letting readers fill in the details they already know (detention, offshore processing, indefinite limbo) while denying them the escape hatch of quibbling over particulars.

The most pointed phrase is “being carried out in our name.” It collapses the usual moral alibi - that harsh policies are merely “government decisions” - by reattaching agency to citizens. Mackay is writing as a social commentator attentive to national character, and the subtext is that identity talk (“fair go,” decency, mateship) is cheap when it isn’t matched by political discomfort. The line doesn’t ask for pity; it asks for shame sharp enough to break complacency.