Jack Waterford
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.
Jack's recent articles
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.
21 May 2024
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.
14 May 2024
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?
7 May 2024
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.
30 April 2024
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 the backwards steps being planned by the Albanese government.
23 April 2024
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 that, their bloody, broken and bruised bodies may be on display, having suffered pains, indignities and humiliations no other person could survive. But while there is even a glimmer of a pulse, they are plotting their comebacks.
16 April 2024
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.
9 April 2024
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 strong independent voices, and, in the Greens the risk of an alternative left-of-centre governing party is given encouragement. Better the devil you know in two-party contests.
1 April 2024
Clare ONeil dances to Duttons tune
Clare ONeil, 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 not seem to change much for short-, medium- or long-term considerations.
25 March 2024
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. Theres no particular problem of giving expression to ones beliefs in this country, and almost any attempt to express such a freedom would end up creating more problems, and possibly more restrictions than it solves.
18 March 2024
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 the prices that houses are currently commanding.
11 March 2024
No slowing the ACT rape merry-go-round
Litigation about the alleged rape in a ministers 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 criminal justice sense, given that the accused man cannot be retried.
4 March 2024
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 Blairs 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 Campbells child asking, What did you do in the war, Daddy? Campbell replies, I started it.
26 February 2024
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.
19 February 2024
Israels propaganda has ceased to convince or persuade even its friends
Israels citizens seem either blithely unaware of the world's horror at the terror raining down on Gaza, or do not care. Whichever, the barbarity has stripped it of the significant moral advantage given by the Hamas atrocities of October 7, and have caused fundamental reappraisal of Israels standing among people once disposed to be sympathetic or admiring.
12 February 2024
When open justice is an optional ingredient
I had been assuming that Julian Assange, whose case comes up for adjudication in the British Courts soon, was a shoo-in for being Australias prisoner of conscience of the decade, but a late entry into the competition is Michael Pezzullo, who appears to have been condemned by an Australian Star Chamber convening in secret, without the public having any satisfactory explanation of what he is said to have done wrong.
5 February 2024
Opportunity for real tax reform goes wanting
I very much doubt that Anthony Albanese will be losing much sleep from opposition claims that he is a liar, or not to be trusted on anything after his volte face on tax cuts focused at higher income earners. Thats even if you regard as a lie an election promise which is subsequently not followed to the letter.
29 January 2024
Australias biggest handicap: believing our own bullshit about our military
One of the many things Australians should consider as they contemplate our nationhood on the day set aside for this purpose is our glorious tradition of being not very good at fighting wars. We boast of our military traditions, our baptisms of fire and of our long traditions of unquestioning obedience and eager anticipation of the needs of various great and powerful friends.
22 January 2024
Tide turning on boat people bastardry
A day I have long prophesied, and for which I have been yearning may be at hand. Its a pitythat the Albanese government does not really deserve a place at any celebrations, and may indeed, try to frustrate them.
15 January 2024
Oppressive secrecy needs more dashes of cold water yet
We can all be glad that judges constituting the ACT Court of Appeal in the Bernard Collaery case had a more liberal view of the need for open justice than the judge who had been set to hear the case. This was before the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, stepped in to drop the prosecution altogether. But it is too early to come to any conclusion that the oppressive overreach of national security legislation, and its threat to the justice system is over.
9 January 2024
Release the full report on Mike Pezzullos misdeeds
It is time for Albanese to take the public into his confidence. He has an instinct for secretiveness that almost matches that of Scott Morrison.
1 January 2024
Plodding Labor will rue its missed opportunities
Labor will have already has squandered its time and its opportunities. It needs leadership of guts and vision, not timidity, caution and mortal terror of offending anyone.
26 December 2023
Holding Justice in contempt: Janet Albrechtsen and a new weapon for rape defendants
The contempts highlighted by Justice Michael Lee in the recent defamation case between Bruce Lehrmann and Channel 10 are minor compared with the blatant leaking of phone transcripts. During the Lehrmann case, police handed to Lehrmanns solicitors thousands of pages of texts and emails between the alleged victim and others, from nearly a year before the alleged rape to after it. Somebody passed on the unused phone records to Janet Albrechtsen, of the Australian. An advocate for Lehrmanns innocence, it is impossible that she could have obtained the material properly. There is no injured party with the capacity to push...
18 December 2023
Biden unable to slow the Israeli slaughter
Israel is a nation not greatly given to following advice, even from its great and powerful friends and guarantors, unless and to the extent it accords with its own judgment of where its national interest lies. Thats partly because it sees itself as being surrounded by enemies, ever in a desperate position, and bound to suffer if it adopts the wrong strategies and tactics. What better discipline, or morale, than understanding that any one of their strategic or tactical mistakes could end their countrys existence.
11 December 2023
Shiver runs up and breaks the Labor spine
There is never a bottom to Labor ministerial cowardice and incompetence when manipulated mob fury is at its height. On immigration policy, Labor has surrendered, and is dancing to Dutton's tune.
28 November 2023
Was Pezzullo recording leak from a federal agency monitoring his communications?
The sacking of Mike Pezzullo was inevitable once Nine media published his email correspondence with a Liberal party lobbyist and powerbroker. So far, however, the Public Service Commission and the government is doing altogether too much to avoid detailing the circumstances that provide chapter and verse of the numerous improprieties that covered the correspondence, or the Pezzullo management style and his relationship with the coalition government setting that made them possible.
27 November 2023
The Attorney who chooses his battles, too rarely
Mark Dreyfus is one of those who gives every appearance of being intimidated by the national security state.
20 November 2023
Gutless leaders without faith, hope or charity
People often say that we get the politicians we deserve, but I am not sure that even the Australians who voted no at the recent referendum deserve what passed for political leadership and quality representation that has been on recent display.
13 November 2023
Judicial activism overturns years of inhumane cruelty on immigration detention
It is, alas, far too early to proclaim the end of Australias barbarous and inhumane refugee management system. But a series of recent High Court decisions cutting back, on constitutional grounds, the arbitrary powers of immigration ministers and bureaucrats may well be later seen as the moment that the tide turned on a nightmare that has diminished Australias and Australians international reputation and citizenship, treated thousands of asylum seekers with deliberate cruelty to no good end, and, probably made us less rather than more capable of dealing with a continuing crisis of the movement of people from war, famine, climate...
6 November 2023
Israels moral power ebbing away in a human rights catastrophe
Israels strategic choices, as Israelis see it, are rather like those sometimes argued for Australia. It wants powerful friends but cannot take them for granted. Ultimately it must depend on itself, if needs be alone. Surrounded by deadly enemies, it must make the cost of conquest so high, and so uncertain, that invaders are deterred. All the better when one has nuclear weapons, because its enemies must consider whether, if the survival of the state is in question, Israel would use them, whether on the battlefield or in the cities of the enemy.
30 October 2023
Hamas has set a trap. It depends on Israels brutal response
In the 75 years since it won nationhood in a field of blood, Israel has fought many wars against its neighbours and its indigenous population. Each has been an existential struggle, because its enemies wanted still do to annihilate it altogether.
23 October 2023
Israel will never be safe until Palestine is free
No attempt to explain, rationalise, find some counter-equivalence for, nor any attempt to see matters through the eyes and the experiences of the murderers rather than the immediate victims can justify or forgive the barbaric massacre of Israeli children, women and men by Hamas warriors after they broke out of Gaza. It does not forgive collective punishment, or the counter-massacre of Palestinians it inspired either. But one of the starting-off points for dealing with the latest upsurge of irrational violence must be the sheer enormity of what was done to southern Israelis.
16 October 2023
The Voice has been silenced, but now we must listen
As vanquished Australians, white and black, fell back in ruin, defeat and humiliation on Saturday, the most galling prospect they must face is that for many of the victorious, the Voice battle was but the first engagement in a longer war. They do not want to give their enemies time for regrouping, or even for trench-building by which they can defend what they have got. Now, they might think, is the time to preserve the momentum for fundamental change in indigenous affairs.
9 October 2023
Will referendum defeat foretell doom for Albanese?
Theres no spin or ex-post facto interpretation of the likely defeat of the Aboriginal Voice referendum able to disguise a resounding setback for Aboriginal Australians.
3 October 2023
PwC: $1 Billion in penalties would be a fair settlement
Sooner or later many hope sooner people will decide that the scourging and self-flagellation of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the big consultancies has gone far enough. A few penances perhaps if the AFP are up to it, a few prosecutions and government departments can resume the business of outsourcing most of its thinking to former colleagues at about 10 times the cost of doing it themselves.
2 October 2023
Did unlamented Pezzullo dream of taking the Chinese surrender in Beijing?
I have never had much regard for Mike Pezzullo, and my regard is lower for the disclosures this week of Nine and Fairfax journalists of his secret email correspondence with politicians he thought he might be able to influence. As any number of people have said, his position is untenable, and he must look forward to, at best, the hope that some private sector consultancy might pick him up.
25 September 2023
Lets avoid more Covid disasters. The public already knows who to blame
During Australias Covid-19 pandemic response, some companies received billions in contracts made without tender, sometimes by ministerial intervention. It would be too much, of course, to hope that anything the inquiry into the pandemic response does to address this issue will be taken up with any enthusiasm by the Albanese government. It seems to have lost all zeal for reform.
11 September 2023
Dutton has made himself the Voice target
It may be too late for supporters of the Yes cause at the referendum to retrieve their initially majority support among the population.
4 September 2023
Labors weakness for little rorts
When Labor next loses state office in NSW, it will almost certainly be entirely its own fault. One might have expected that the partys twelve years in the wilderness would have taught it something about restraint, and about the risks of reverting to its ancient, and traditional ways. Not a bit of it.
28 August 2023
Climate and housing left on the 2063 agenda
The Albanese government is tiptoeing as if it has all the time in the world.
21 August 2023
Anthony Albanese is paralysed and failing to grasp the moment
A good many people who worked hard for a Labor government are now astonished at its lack of ambition. More nagging for those who have dreamed of Labor in action has been the complete refusal to countenance any shift in national security policy, in human rights law, in planning aggression against China, and in a nuclear-powered submarine adventure that massively reduces this nations freedom of action in any regional conflict. Its time for Labor to recharge its batteries.
14 August 2023
Sofronoff endorses the status quo on rape cases
Recently we have heard the alleged victim in the Bruce Lehrmann case discuss how she felt herself, in effect, defiled again by her treatment by the justice system. Nothing Walter Sofronoff has written in his inquiry into the case could cheer her. Nor would it engender any confidence in future better treatment for any other woman who had been sexually assaulted. Sofronoff has essentially endorsed the status quo.
7 August 2023
Shane Drumgold, despite his alleged sins, is an unlikely master villain
In the Sofronoff inquiry, Counsel Assisting, Ms Erin Longbottom went straight for the jugular of Shane Drumgold, prosecutor in the Bruce Lehrmann rape trial. She made mincemeat of him. By the end of her display of complete dominance, he was a shattered wreck. He had withdrawn his suggestions of political interference, softened his criticism of police resistance to a prosecution, and admitted that some statements he had made to the presiding judge were not well-phrased. Report summaries of the Sofronoff inquiry into the ACT Justice system suggest Drumgold was entirely to blame. This is tosh, the more so for being...
31 July 2023
Flesh and bones on the corruption menu
Spare a thought for the National Anti-Corruption Committee which has so many juicy cases before it that there is a substantial chance that it might have to pass on investigating some of the serious sources of potential corruption around the nation.
24 July 2023
Integrity is what they do, not what they pretend
Integrity, accountability and stewardship are, post the Robodebt royal commission, to be the watchwords of the hour. The cynic will note that the agencies to oversee changing the culture are those which did most, in word and deed, to create, foster and promote the old culture, and that not one of them has publicly examined the agencys performance over the past decade or fessed up to any departmental words or actions that were plainly less than ideal on the integrity front.
17 July 2023
Dont count on much post-Robodebt reform
The Holmes report into the Robodebt scandal gives the Albanese government all the authority and mandate it needs for root and branch reform of the public service, including a spill of its senior leadership.