Attorney-General Christian Porter (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
As Australia was drifting into its festivity-induced haze over the Christmas break, Attorney-General Christian Porter quietly slipped out news of a $500,000-a-year appointment he’d made to a Liberal Party lifer. Nothing unusual in that.
Even less surprising was that it was another well-paid job for life at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal which the government has relentlessly stacked with cronies.
Yet the appointment of Karen Synon, made in the figurative dead of night, deserves a closer look, not least because she is the government pick to run the very area of the AAT — the social services and child support division — which called out the illegal basis of the government’s robodebt scheme. That scheme was a scandalous abuse of power which left a trail of ruin in the name of budget repair on the way to a billion-dollar class action settlement.