Jack Waterford
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.
Jack's recent articles
10 July 2023
Making Voice a referendum on the Labor government
By the time of the referendum on the Voice, No campaigners look likely to have turned it into a referendum on the Albanese government, and, probably into wokeness. It may be a tragedy if they do, whether for First Australians or the nation generally, because it will inevitably exacerbate divisions in the community.
3 July 2023
NSW ICAC findings sound warning to federal ministers
As the National Anti-Corruption Commission is opening for business, some ministers tend to believe that the mere fact of winning government gives them an unlimited licence to distribute public loot to their friends, constituents and major donors. The silence and complicity of senior public servants in response to such misgovernment is one of the great scandals of our age.
26 June 2023
Voice needs a serious rattle of spears
The biggest risk to the success of the referendum on Aboriginal recognition is the Albanese governments lack of resolution. It has strongly promoted the voice, successfully in parliament, but far less effectively within the broader community. There is a serious prospect that the various proponents of the No case will win by default, mostly because the Yes campaign has not started and does not seem organised.
19 June 2023
Our law and order violate women
Every woman in Australia, and not a few men, should experience a shiver of apprehension about the Bruce Lehrmann case.
12 June 2023
An inquiry of self-limited curiosity
Senator Linda Reynolds is suggesting that she might seek to take her complaints of ill-treatment during the controversy of the Bruce Lehrman rape allegation to the new National Anti-Corruption Commission. That would include, we gather, allegations that Senator Katy Gallagher was briefed by the alleged victim and her boyfriend before the allegations had been made publicly. Apparently, some on the Labor side of politics (we assume the late Senator Kimberley Kitchen, regularly given to this sort of treachery) had tipped her off about Labors knowledge of the allegation one Reynolds had been aware of, at least to a degree,...
5 June 2023
Catholics should go where the government isnt
I do hope that the Catholic Church remains closely involved in providing health care to Canberra citizens, particularly the poorer ones, after the takeover by the government of Calvary public hospital. Indeed I suspect it could be making for itself, and Canberra citizens, greater treasure in heaven if it got entirely out of the provision of government-funded health care and concentrated on areas where the less well-off were not as well served by government as they could be and should be.
29 May 2023
Sending the cops into PwC is the tamest possible response to fraud on the taxpayer
The idea of sending the PriceWaterhouseCoopers scandal off for criminal investigation by the Australian Federal Police is such a thoroughly bad idea that one might imagine that it had been recommended by one of the major consultancies, perhaps PwC itself.
22 May 2023
How PwC monetises its insider secrets
The crisis in which PricewaterhouseCoopers finds itself is a useful illustration that the problem of politicians and bureaucrats becoming lobbyists, and of the revolving door syndrome are far from the only ones besetting integrity in public administration. The widespread use of supposedly independent consultants, many with deep and intractable conflicts of interest, is undermining good government, and costing taxpayers extra billions they should not have to be paying.
15 May 2023
Can Labor remain a winner simply by being less worse?
It would be a fatal mistake for Labor to think that it represents the values and aspirations of its primary constituencies. It doesnt. It is just that it misrepresents them slightly less than the coalition.
8 May 2023
Ex-politicians who go over to the enemy
It has been only in recent times that we have had former prime ministers taking up positions in foreign countries, even working for foreign governments. It ought to be regarded as deeply shameful, and more than somewhat disloyal. If our public stewards cannot be trusted to do the right thing, it becomes necessary to control them by law.
1 May 2023
Budget must show what we are invested in
In three weeks or so, a little after the second Labor budget, the Albanese government will mark its first year in office.
24 April 2023
Dutton gives voice to Jacinta Price
Peter Dutton has staked his political future on Jacinta Price, his new shadow minister for Aboriginal Affairs, a woman of less than 10 months experience in Parliament, none of which have been spent in government.
17 April 2023
Home Affairs' culture of getting things wrong
The minister for Home Affairs and the department have been given extraordinary powers, including significant power to hurt and oppress others. For good or ill, the legislature has authorised and permitted their determined cruelty to asylum seekers over many years, their beliefs about stripping citizenship from our nationals, deporting our home-grown criminals and establishing the need for a national surveillance system that would make a Chinese dictator blush. If they must have such powers despite their manifest want of judgment, detachment and decency, it should be subject to some external review.
10 April 2023
Albanese should take the Voice to the people
The gutsy thing for Anthony Albanese to do in the wake of the coalitions decision to vote no in the Voice referendum would be to carry on virtuously with the ballot, taking such advantage as he can from the Liberals decision to break the heart of more than half the country. But the inspired response would be to announce an election in which Liberal hostility to the voice would be only one of a hundred examples of where Peter Dutton and his party are out of step with the public mood, and almost adamantly determined to infuriate it.
3 April 2023
Public servants contemplating abolition of the people
For a public servant of my acquaintance, the new and emerging problem of public administration is dealing with what she called activists and advocates.
27 March 2023
The shame of missing a national mood
At least until the 1964 Freedom Rides, Australia had a Jim Crow system every bit as bad as in the American South.
20 March 2023
Albanese a pale shadow of Keating, even on subs
Paul Keating did all Australians, and all the world, an important favour over the past week.
13 March 2023
We dont need subs or war with China
The pussies in Labor are reluctant to differ by a millimetre from the coalition on defence, foreign affairs and national security lest they be accused of treason.
6 March 2023
Its the bureaucracy that enabled the Robodebt shame
Major General Kathryn Campbell, currently sitting in a fairly empty office in the Department of Defence on a miserly $900,000 plus a year, seems set to become, by acclamation as much as by the weight of the evidence so far available the chief bureaucratic victim of the Robodebt affair.
27 February 2023
Be alert but not very alarmed as ASIO rediscovers bad, as opposed to friendly, foreign spies
The Director General of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Mike Burgess, is an intelligence professional whose views about threats to national security should be considered carefully, and on their merits.
20 February 2023
Fighting to the last Ukrainian
On Tuesday, General Mark Milley, chair of the American joint chiefs of staff declared, in effect, that Russian had been militarily defeated in Ukraine. Russia, he said, was now a global pariah, and the world remained inspired by Ukrainian bravery and resilience.
14 February 2023
Pearls and Irritations has never been more necessary
Pearls and Irritations is essential reading for anyone interested in public policy analysis.
13 February 2023
Not every liberal wants Dutton to win in Aston
Peter Dutton faces a stern test of his leadership and his strategies in preparing for a by-election in the Melbourne outer suburban seat of Aston. Its in Victoria, where the Liberal Party has been on the nose, as most recently demonstrated in November by the swingeing repudiation of the party in favour of Dictator Dan Andrews at the state election.
6 February 2023
Perrottet best throw of the dice is gambling reform
NSW goes to the polls at the end of next month, and Labor must be regarded as a very clear favourite. Recent polls have put Labor 12 points ahead -- 56 to 44 of the coalition. Even allowing that the Opposition leader, Chris Minns must win back seats before he builds a majority, it suggests a quite comfortable win over Dominic Perrottet.
30 January 2023
Voice vote may demand blood in the water
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the referendum on the Voice will be won not as a virtually unanimous offering to First Nations Australians but narrowly in an ugly, bitter and divisive brawl between older and younger Australians. Even a win will have the capacity to leave divisions in the nation, and in political parties that will endure for many years.
23 January 2023
Jacinda Ardern, the ultimate accolade, and Jim Molan
The least well-developed political sense is the feel for when it is time to move on.
16 January 2023
George Pell leaves a diminished church, to successors hardly better
George Pell was, by temperament and personality, about the worst possible choice to be made a bishop, then an archbishop, and ultimately a cardinal -- one of the inner circle of the church entrusted with central church administration and the selection of new Popes.
11 January 2023
MPs shilling for private interests
I have long been a fan of the British parliaments system of having independent commissioners for standards who review complaints that MPs have breached their Code of Conduct or the Nolan Committees set of standards of public life.
9 January 2023
How 20 ratbag Republicans could Trump 200 party loyalists
The farce occurring in the US House of Representatives, where a small group of far-right Republicans are seeking to veto the overwhelming choice of their colleagues for the partys congressional leadership, may well be resolved by the weekend in the traditional American parliamentary way, with bribes, deals, committee placements and stiff-arming.
2 January 2023
Decaying Liberals oblivious to the abyss
The state of decline of the Federal Liberal Party revealed by its 2022 election review is so serious that even people who hope it never achieves power again should ask themselves whether it is in Australias interest that it be allowed to continue in its death spiral.
26 December 2022
Please dont mention guilt or innocence while asking if there was a case to answer
Strictly speaking the various inquiries into the case against Bruce Lehrmann for the alleged rape of a colleague do not involve a review of his guilt or innocence.
19 December 2022
Labor lets its moral mandate wither away
A bare six months after being elected, the Albanese government has surrendered almost all of the moral advantage it held over the public administration, and most of the moral advantage it held over the coalition.
12 December 2022
Alleged police sabotage of the Bruce Lehrmann rape prosecution demands proper investigation
The inquiry into alleged police sabotage of the Bruce Lehrmann rape prosecution has the capacity to bring the Australian Federal Police into the biggest crisis of its 43 years, with impacts spreading beyond the contract arrangements by which it delivers policing services to the ACT.
29 November 2022
Dutton will find sudden enthusiasm for the NACC when Labor is questioned
Imagine the day when an NACC investigation reaches the point where it becomes known, perhaps from a leak, that a Labor minister and her office are under investigation. Maybe selling access to the minister for clients with interests to press with the minister.
28 November 2022
Will the Dreyfus-Dutton NACC blow up in Labors face?
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus knows he has deliberately put in place a weaker commission than he and Albanese promised at the election. His dirty deal serves Labors long-term interests. An ongoing activist commission might prove over-powerful, out of control, and a problem for a Labor administration.
21 November 2022
Albaneses China reset leaves national security establishment in the cold
We should all welcome a bilateral decision between Australia and China to tone down the language, lower the temperature and to resume discussions of mutual interests.
14 November 2022
Why is Albo so set on clipping Teal wings?
As Anthony Albanese might see it, almost all of his political good fortune has come from preferring his own judgment and instinct ahead of the advice and experience of others. He has a very long background in politics.
7 November 2022
Australia on the losing side again: "We see you as an easy lay
Sooner or later, probably later, NATO plus Australia will be contemplating the consequences of not having won the war in Ukraine.
1 November 2022
Voters need collateral on the new Labor social contract
Even those who understand very well the whys and the wherefores of the bargain on offer from Treasurer Jim Chalmers would be wise to demand some collateral before they sign up to the bargain.
31 October 2022
A plan for Australia worthy of our wartime heroes
In the desperation of WWII, Australia established a department of post-war reconstruction that drove far reaching change in how the country was governed. After the jolt of the pandemic, a similar department could be an engine room of a new type of government.
24 October 2022
Shergold Review: Opinions of the great and the good have no special weight
The Shergold review of Australias pandemic response is infected by the Sydney and Canberra view of putting the economy ahead of individual health.
17 October 2022
Is Albanese up to the job of public service reform?
I have a terrible foreboding about public service reform under the Albanese government and am beginning to wonder whether it should set itself a simpler task and leave serious improvement to some future government more up to the job. My pick for the simpler tasks would be abolishing 1300 phone lines for Centrelink, all customer or client service agencies, the restoration of a printed Commonwealth Gazette whereby the contact number of all SES officers were published to journalists, fellow public servants, and, most particularly to clients and customers. Why should junior Centrelink staff have to bear the brunt of popular...
10 October 2022
No place for AFP in anti-corruption teams
The national secretary of the Australian Federal Police Association, Alex Karuana, may have had empires and AFP pay increases in mind when he sounded a caution about the national anti-corruption commission, about which he is generally enthusiastic. Yet theres the risk, he warns, that staffing the NACC may strip the AFP of critical expertise and operational capacity, thus weakening the AFP capacity to fight crime and win.
5 October 2022
Non-believers, the timid and party rorters have got at corruption bill
Citizens who want an effective agency to weed out corruption and maladministration from Australian public life would do well to get involved in the National Anti-Corruption Commission debate. It is never going to be any better than the first model that goes through the parliament over the next few months. If history in state and territory jurisdictions is any guide, only whittling down of any powers granted now is in prospect.
27 September 2022
Time to get fair dinkum, or the Voice proposal will lose momentum and support
Many of the proponents of the Voice referendum already agree that the referendum should go forward only if a Yes vote is a virtual certainty. Some expect that the effect of a rejection of the proposal would be catastrophic for First Nations people.
26 September 2022
No guts, no glory in deposing the King
Right thinking Australians ought to want their nation to be a republic led by a president rather than by a protestant King or Queen of England. Even the local self-effacing should want it if only for international and national self-respect.
20 September 2022
Republican Albanese imprisoned by royal protocol
I was arrested at a visit by then Prince Charles to Alice Springs in 1977 for handing out press statements on Aboriginal living standards. I avoided jail, but the less fortunate Albanese government has been imprisoned by royal protocol and constitutional custom.
13 September 2022
Labor must pro-actively manage potential conflicts of interest
The Liberal Partys attack on the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, over an alleged conflict of interest in his share ownership was an unimpressive flop. It did not establish a case that Dreyfus had failed to meet the technical standard of disclosure of interests set by the prime minister a standard far higher than that set down by any prime minister before. It also failed to make any case that conflict of interest was involved, by any other standard, including the pub test.
12 September 2022
Albanese wont rescue the Governor General from his impossible position
The Governor-General (GG), David Hurley, is in an increasingly invidious position, and sooner rather than later will feel impelled to resign. He may not yet see it this way and will in any event be preoccupied with the Queens funeral and the transition of the King. But the prime ministers intervention on Wednesday night to kill off a $24 million plus leadership scheme was designed to protect both Hurley and his office from the ignominy of being a subject of debate in both houses of parliament. How long he can, or will avoid this, has to be open to question.