Jack Waterford

It may be too late for supporters of the Yes cause at the referendum to retrieve their initially majority support among the population. (more…)

When Labor next loses state office in NSW, it will almost certainly be entirely its own fault. One might have expected that the party’s 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. (more…)

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 nation’s freedom of action in any regional conflict. It’s time for Labor to recharge its batteries. (more…)

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. (more…)

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 agency’s performance over the past decade or ‘fessed up’ to any departmental words or actions that were plainly less than ideal on the integrity front. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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 Labor’s knowledge of the allegation – one Reynolds had been aware of, at least to a degree, for nearly a year. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

For a public servant of my acquaintance, the new and emerging problem of public administration is dealing with what she called activists and advocates. (more…)

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. (more…)