Writer
Jack Waterford
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.
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Stewards should have an early look at this roughie racehorse
We can all be grateful that the acting auditor general Rona Mellor has decided to take at least a sideways glance into Commonwealth speculation, alongside a similar bet by the probably outgoing Queensland government, in an American horse in the great quantum computing race. I know nothing to say that there is anything intrinsically dodgy Continue reading »
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Labor on the AUKUS battleground
One of Lyndon Johnson’s sage pieces of political advice was that one should never get into a piss fight with a skunk. Kamala Harris should take note. But so should Anthony Albanese, who is inadequately equipped for an argument over AUKUS and the submarine deal with his predecessor Paul Keating. Continue reading »
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Labor makes industry by embracing its gambling mates
History has too stately a progress to be the guide to tactics. But those who make history that does not fit logically into a pattern of principle, consistency and good judgment are doomed to stumble in the short term and earn the contempt of its core followers. Continue reading »
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Albo may struggle to enthuse his followers
I do not expect that there would be an outbreak of existential angst, despair, or deep public sullenness, even among committed Labor voters, if Anthony Albanese were to fail to win the next election. Continue reading »
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Slogans masquerading as policies – the Dutton playbook?
I don’t expect that Donald Trump, presidential candidate, or Trump, elected president, gives a toss whether Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton is prime minister of Australia after the next Australian election. Continue reading »
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Kamala is still the underdog
The withdrawal of Joe Biden and the selection of Kamala Harris has transformed the presidential election of November. It will now be argued on different issues and on different battlegrounds, not all of former president Donald Trump’s choosing. His planned strategy has been much weakened and try as he might he will have difficulty in Continue reading »
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Martyrdom transforms Trump
Anyone watching the Australian diplomats at the Republican national convention would have quickly seen the backslapping, the warm handshakes with the republican tree people and the Australian understanding that, more likely than not, Donald Trump will be elected president in November. Our diplomats, and those with whom they have intercourse, can read the signs as Continue reading »
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Albo’s envoys will entrench religious and political divisions for generations
Albanese’s advisers must have been smoking something when they decided that Australia should have envoys against antisemitism and Islamophobia. Continue reading »
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Trump is the old man most likely to win the US election
For most of the past year, Joe Biden has been calming panickers in the inner circles of the Democrat Party, persuading them that the campaign was under control, that things were moving his way, not least because of Donald Trump’s criminal law problems. The big reveal at the first presidential debate showed an emperor without Continue reading »
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APS reform bus runs out of solar power
Andrew Podger, former Public Service Commissioner and advocate for reforms that take account of recent failures in public administration, is circulating a paper on priorities for change. About thirty former senior public servants, most with senior Order of Australia postnominals, have endorsed, without necessarily adopting each specific suggestion, his paper as a basis for a Continue reading »
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Payman becomes symbol for discontent with Labor
The strategic and tactical geniuses inside the prime minister’s office and the man they serve may take time to appreciate how comprehensively they have mismanaged popular discontent about Labor’s passive support for Israel during the war against the Palestinians of the past eight months. Instead, they are deluding themselves about being politically outplayed by a Continue reading »
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Beware: corrupt conduct is not always criminal
Last week, Anthony Albanese was reckoned by some to have caused a political coup by luring a former NSW Liberal Treasurer, Matt Kean out of NSW politics and into a Commonwealth position as chair of the climate change authority. Strictly, this might rate as a patronage job, rather than one controlled by public service Act Continue reading »
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Nuclear vibrations pose more threat to Albo than Dutton
If Labor permits the next election to be a referendum about nuclear power, there’s a very good chance that Peter Dutton would win handsomely. For one thing it will be on ground of the Opposition’s choosing. For another, it would not be a poll about nuclear power for very long, but an open-ended referendum about Continue reading »
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Only shame can make integrity guardians do their duty
A predisposition to secrecy still handicaps integrity in Australian government. Continue reading »
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Corruption commission has yet to prove its worth
It hasn’t even finished its first year of operations, but those who were hoping for big things from the National Anti-Corruption Commission and its chair, Justice Paul Brereton would be wise to temper mightily their hopes and expectations of what it might achieve. Continue reading »
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Canberra bureaucrats commissioning NT houses unfit for purpose
Labor’s $4 billion for Indigenous housing in the Northern Territory is set for failure unless it incorporates Aboriginal expertise. Continue reading »
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Our quality of life under threat from the meanness of politicians
Why do politicians and businesspeople of this nation continually pretend that the nation is on the ropes? The average income of most citizens and the average wealth has, in real terms, never been higher. Yet this is a nation which has heavily cut back on foreign aid and has been disinvesting in real terms in Continue reading »
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Courts protect crimes by agents of the state, punish whistleblowers
David McBride, for all his flaws, is a better, a more decent and honourable person than any of those he has discomforted or outraged. Continue reading »
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To his adversaries, Albo is a pushover
The way that the government has permitted the opposition and the Murdoch media (and even the ABC and Fairfax media) to push it around on issues such as climate and immigration policy raises the question: Does modern Labor have any moral bottom at all? Continue reading »
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The hospital at the bottom of the DV cliff
A sense of crisis now pervades discussion of what to do about violence against women, made obvious by recent marches demanding action, statistics suggesting that the rate of fatal attacks is increasing, and general unease after several knife attacks in Sydney, in one of which women represented five of the six victims. Continue reading »
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Is Albo’s big new idea too late?
Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have put their future in the Labor pantheon at high risk with their new protectionism. Sooner or later, a real Labor leader will emerge, and one of her first serious acts will be to turn the nation back towards its natural advantage in free trade. It will be harder for Continue reading »
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The Anti-China War Book: Pezzullo hears the call again
It is extremely hard to kill off a public figure of the calibre of Mike Pezzullo. As with a person of similar personality, Tony Abbott, one can be sure they are out of the play for good only when their bodies lie at a crossroads at midnight, with a wooden stake through their hearts. Before Continue reading »
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Over Dutton now looms the spectre of a quick trip to Government House
By mid-May, Budget time, the Albanese government will be a week short of two years in power. Albanese is moving into the zone where he could confidently approach the Governor-General, new or old, for an early election, perhaps as early as July, unexceptionably in October or November. Continue reading »
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Crossbench is Labor’s real opposition
Albanese’s practice of preferring to govern and legislate through deals with the coalition rather than with Greens and Independents is plainly because of a theory or strategy of what is in Labor’s long-term interests. It presumably includes the fear that Labor itself could atomise, as the coalition has done, if the influence and power of Continue reading »
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Clare O’Neil dances to Dutton’s tune
Clare O’Neil, minister for Home Affairs, was this week plaintively criticising the Greens for playing “politics” over draconian and ill-thought-out legislation designed by the government to anticipate its next refugee crisis. She was quite wrong. However inconvenient for her, the Greens have long had a consistent (and principled) policy on refugee matters, one that does Continue reading »
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We now need, it seems, a Voice for bigots
The best argument against having an explicit legislated or constitutional right of freedom of religion in Australia comes right out of the playbook of the No campaign during the referendum on a constitutional Voice for Indigenous Australians. There’s no particular problem of giving expression to one’s beliefs in this country, and almost any attempt to Continue reading »
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How our tax system is making the rich richer. And the poor poorer
Australians frozen out of the housing market cannot expect that government is going to do anything that effectively closes the gap between current house prices and what most of the unhoused could afford as a deposit. Modern politicians of all stripes are all agreed that their political survival depends on doing the maximum to sustain Continue reading »
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No slowing the ACT rape merry-go-round
Litigation about the alleged rape in a minister’s office at Parliament House in 2019 – more than five years ago – seems to continue to multiply, if with ever decreasing prospects of ever resolving any issues at the heart of the matter. This is something that is now, at law, unknowable in any sort of Continue reading »
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ASIO needs a boss who can stand above the tumult
At the height of the argument about western conviction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2002, Tony Blair’s minder, Alastair Campbell was accused of asking intelligence agencies to “sex up” what passed for evidence. The satirical magazine Private Eye published a cover with Alastair Campbell’s child asking, “What did you do in Continue reading »
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Australia’s First Nations still looking over the 1788 chasm
More than four months after a crushing defeat in the Voice referendum, and soon after the Closing the Gap report confirmed that there was almost no progress in improving Aboriginal lives last year, Aboriginal players in the yes case are moving towards an inquest into how their case went so terribly wrong. Continue reading »
