Jack Waterford
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.
Jack's recent articles
15 April 2025
Federal election: A different type of beauty contest
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is fighting this election as if it were what some of my sisters in journalism would call a dick-measuring competition.
8 April 2025
We should walk away — quickly — from Trump’s America
Anthony Albanese must feel that he understands how John Curtin felt after the fall of Singapore. The idea that Winston Churchill “abandoned” Australia to its fate is virtually a dogmatic myth inside Labor, not only part of the cult of Curtin but of Paul Keating, whose version of what occurred has been often repeated.
1 April 2025
Will things fall apart? Can the centre hold?
Community independents, including Teals, are expected to do well at the May election. Their capacity to widen the space in the middle ground of politics is a measure of both Labor and Coalition ineptitude.
25 March 2025
We can’t unscramble the AUKUS and ANZUS eggs
Before this election is much older, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are going to have to determine where they stand on all the important issues. There’s a substantial chance that both are wrongly positioned and that each might have to face the other way, or perish politically. It’s not for an argument about which vista is best for Australia, alas. It’s for which is best for which leader, and which party.
18 March 2025
ANZUS and NATO are kaput and Trump doesn’t care
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have proven too gutless, so far, to speak frankly to Australians about the implications of the imposition of new tariffs by the US, the first of many, to be imposed on Australia. They have expressed some ritual regrets and said it was a poor reward for their sycophantic grovelling over the years. They have not said that the coming election is the perfect time for blunt discussions of what it all means.
11 March 2025
Are America’s values our values anymore?
No issue in the forthcoming election is as important as Australia’s international identity and the crisis in the Western alliance about its senior partner, the United States. The alliance is fragmenting and, it appears, President Trump is daring Europe to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression independently. He wants NATO members to double their defence spending so they are no longer freeloading from America’s military spending. Other allies, including Australia, should do so too. At just the same time, he is beginning to wage economic war against most of Europe, Canada, and Australia,by swingeing tariffs, as a punishment, he claims, for...
4 March 2025
The public is slow to believe the best of politicians
Peter Dutton deserves a little sympathy as he indignantly denies any conflict of interest or impropriety over his purchases of banking shares and real estate. Many people always believe the worst of politicians, particularly if there is any suggestion of abuse of position, making money on the side, or personal enrichment. Dutton has pointed to his high ethical standards, to the fact that he has always disclosed changes in his holdings, and to the improbability of his having any advance or inside knowledge of the Rudd Government’s plans about guaranteeing banking savings at a time when he was in opposition....
25 February 2025
Silence is golden for a smart independent
Any Teal or independent standing for the House of Representatives at the election would be well advised to keep schtum about their cards in the upcoming poker game. All will depend on the numbers and negotiations with the major parties and each other following the election. Indeed, any one of them who cannot resist the temptation “to come clean with the electorate” on their intentions may be dealing themselves out of any bargaining process.
18 February 2025
Teals should hammer unfinished integrity agenda
The Commonwealth minister in charge of electoral matters, Senator Don Farrell is a traditionalist. It was entirely in line with parliamentary traditions that recent “reforms” to electoral laws have been on the nose. Like parliamentarians’ pay rises being smuggled through in bipartisan mutual esteem at the end of late night sessions, changes to the electoral rules always reinforce the impression of impropriety and irregularity in the divvying up of taxpayer loot by Labor and Coalition machine men. Loopholes to get around the rules, particularly about donations. Small players, especially independents, are not allowed to be “in on the joke.
11 February 2025
Yes, let’s have an inquiry into the smelly Dural caravan affair
The Dural caravan affair stinks to high heaven. If I were Anthony Albanese, I would bow, with every appearance of reluctance, to Peter Dutton’s demands for an inquiry. Far from shrouding this inquiry with a cloud of secrecy of the sort so beloved by the Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and his department, I would opt for an open inquiry of the NSW ICAC type, if one that permitted the identity of security agents to be suppressed.
4 February 2025
Who’s tough enough not to pull the AUKUS trigger?
A time may come when someone must write the history of Labor’s 2025 historic electoral triumph over the Coalition, and the “rope a dope” strategies and tactics which took Opposition leader Peter Dutton in, then spat him out. If it all comes to pass, students of Labor history will note that it was two key figures of the left, Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese himself, who rode AUKUS to victory in the successive AUKUS Cups.
28 January 2025
Will public servants become agents of the party rather than the state?
One of the strong points Anthony Albanese made before the last election was that Scott Morrison had virtually abandoned honest government, good government, accountable government and transparent government.
21 January 2025
Laurel-less Biden limps for the exit. Will Albanese be next?
Joe Biden’s inaction and diffidence has made him a party to Israel’s atrocities.
14 January 2025
A clear and present danger to the peace of the world
Donald Trump is still to be sworn in for his second term, but is already confirming that he remains a menace to world peace, security and stability.
7 January 2025
Steering without a compass or a map
In 1971, Time magazine decided that it might do a friendly cover story on newly installed Liberal prime minister, Billy McMahon, and asked for co-operation from his media office. The office asked that questions be submitted in writing. This was not from mistrust of Time – indeed the office was deeply conscious of what Jane Austen would call the magazine’s condescension in so honouring an Asian backwater. It was from mistrust of Billy, who was capable of almost any media stuff-up.
31 December 2024
Whipping up Aboriginal enthusiasm
Here’s a sad prediction for 2025. By the end of next year, more states and territories will have dropped the age of criminal responsibility to 10, and adopted punitive laws based on slogans such as Queensland’s “you do the crime, you do the time” for juvenile as well as adult offenders. The greatest proportion will be Indigenous, of course.
24 December 2024
Few voters think they have benefitted much from Labor in government
It goes almost without saying that much of the ordinary economic commentary ahead of the election, whether in the Murdoch media, the Fairfax media and the ABC, as well as among the senior bureaucracy and the business community (including Reserve Bank governors), will proceed on the assumption that any money spent on subsidies, tax breaks and incentives to business will be thoroughly justified as investments in Australian growth and development. Likewise with subsidies to coal, gas and the hydrocarbon industry.
17 December 2024
To defeat Dutton, Labor needs inspiration and leadership from its ‘mortal enemy’ – the Greens
Dutton’s nuclear plans provide an opportunity for a campaign Labor could win. But it won’t be won without girding for war. The need for some political alliance is greater given that neither Albanese nor his senior ministers, and the party organisation, have shown themselves up to serious political struggle on climate change.
10 December 2024
Albo’s pre-emptive kowtow to an imagined Westminster
The Labor Party would like it to be understood that they would prefer that voters give their second preference to the Liberal Party or the National Party, ahead of any Greens, Independents or members of loose groupings such as the Teals. Elders of the party believe that the two-party system – which they consider to be fundamental to the Australian Westminster system – is otherwise in great danger and could, down the track collapse. Please, especially, do not vote Green.
26 November 2024
Distorting elections: Australia’s professional politicians feather their own nests
The ALP is full of legends – of which many old party folk are defiantly proud – of political skullduggery. There have been stuffed ballot boxes, and mysteriously disappearing ones, and forged minutes of branch meetings.
19 November 2024
Labor, party of the comfortably housed, needs the Greens
Labor needs the Greens. It seems to calculate that the Greens have no choice about preferencing them. That might once have seemed logical, but it is by no means certain when Labor’s defence policies are anathema to many Greens, when Labor policies on refugees and immigration are indistinguishable from the coalition’s, and when their climate change and environment policies are deliberately constructed to be only a smidgeon more engaged than the opposition’s.
12 November 2024
Like Kamala, Albanese doesn’t seem to get it
This was a mood election; It was not a referendum about Kamala Harris. Nor was it a referendum of Donald Trump’s character.
5 November 2024
Albanese’s limp self-defence aggravated the damage of Qantas allegations
And the National Anti-Corruption Commission loses its appeal.
29 October 2024
Keeping the public in the dark: Is it time to scrap the NACC and start again?
The National Anti-Corruption Commission has recently issued its first substantial, if highly redacted report clearing a former Department of Home Affairs officer of any suspicion of corruption over a million dollars or more of payments from her son, himself a former home affairs officer who had obtained, without an open tender a contract to provide garrison services on Manus Island worth about $600 million. Nothing sus, says the NACC. The payments, the NACC has found, were to help her, and her boyfriend, another senior Home Affairs officer, with the purchase of a small flat and later a big one.
22 October 2024
ACT Labor holds on, but are wheels coming off the Albanese re-election campaign?
Albanese once said his purpose in life was to “fight Tories.” In government he has done little more than surrender to them.
15 October 2024
ACT’s Barr will struggle to overcome belief he has been in power too long
This ACT election is not an election about policies. Nor, by itself, about significant changes to the style of government.
8 October 2024
Australia poised to enter another US-led Middle East war
With less than two months to go, voters may go to the American polls while their nation is at war. If they do, there is a significant chance that Australia will be dragged in, and in accordance with imperial tradition be sent to fight in the Middle East.
1 October 2024
If we can’t have vision, let’s have boldness and strength of purpose
One should never feel sympathy for a politician caught in a rule-in rule-out game. Perhaps the period should be after the eighth word, but there is something spectacularly dumb about foreclosing on policy options even when they are not under active contemplation, narrowing the range of debate and allowing its terms to be set by the opposition. All the more so when, as experienced politicians well know, there are formulae of words ready to serve to convert a possibility into a non-story.
24 September 2024
Public Service Commission is an enemy of the public and the public interest
Irony does not seem to be the strong point of the Public Service Commissioner, Gordon de Brouwer. During the very moments while explaining why Kathryn Campbell had failed her public service ethics examinations, he was committing much the same sort of sin. This was when he was unconvincingly explaining why he could not, should not, disclose the names of all but one of the other dozen or so accused of failing the ethical code.
17 September 2024
Kamala still facing electoral college hurdles
Kamala Harris was, to my mind, a clear winner of the first debate between herself and Donald Trump. As things stand, however, I reckon that Trump must be still regarded as the favourite to win a majority of the state electoral college votes, and thus become the next president. I hope I am wrong, but on the evidence as I see it, including regular tasting of a fair sample of American perspectives, this is an election still capable of serious surprises.
10 September 2024
It’s now too late for Labor to fix its re-election problems
This week I was practising my argument about a feeling that Albanese Labor has by now left it too late to retrieve its position before the next federal election is due. This was after it was revealed that the economy is on life support and that Labor’s best argument about being a superior economic manager was that its skills had avoided the recession we did not need. It was, however, after it became clear that Bill Shorten was of the same view.
3 September 2024
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 about the “investment,” and it is probably by now a fait accompli. But there are ample warning signs that a lot of bad government thinking is involved, and every prospect that Albanese’s foolish “picking winners” strategy will produce any number of similar fresh “initiatives” as...
27 August 2024
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.
20 August 2024
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.
13 August 2024
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.
6 August 2024
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.
30 July 2024
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 fixing Harris with the blame for any of Biden’s sins, real or alleged.
23 July 2024
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 well as, if not better than anyone else. Australia doesn’t have a vote at the election, and must get on, as best as it can, with the person and the players chosen by the American electoral system.
17 July 2024
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.
16 July 2024
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 clothes, incoherent in his own attack, seemingly almost incapable of taking the battle to the enemy. It accentuated any impulse to feel that he’s already a dud and would be worse if re-elected.
10 July 2024
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 discussion about what they describe as a “once in a generation” opportunity to deliver the urgent need for reform.
9 July 2024
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 novice Labor Senator, who, allegedly, always had it in mind to betray the Labor Party.
2 July 2024
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 processes. Kean has environmental credentials, but his appointment was neither at arm’s length, nor, in the ordinary sense on merit.
25 June 2024
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 the merits of the Albanese government. That would be tapping a lot of disappointment as well as discontent.
18 June 2024
Only shame can make integrity guardians do their duty
A predisposition to secrecy still handicaps integrity in Australian government.
11 June 2024
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.
4 June 2024
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.
28 May 2024
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 the quality of healthcare, education, and culture, all in the name of an austerity said to be demanded by our excesses. Meanwhile, enormous sums have been diverted to defence schemes, and to antagonising our closest trading partner, China.