Christian Porter closes up shop
Remember the heady days of early 2022, when the Morrison government was getting ready to go to its final election? High-profile ministers such as Greg Hunt and Christian Porter had recently announced they’d retire come polling day. The latter, who months earlier had resigned as attorney-general after accepting a donation from a blind trust, had already begun mapping out his future career steps before exiting Parliament.
In an update to Parliament’s register of interests on February 25 that year, Porter announced he had started two new companies: a law firm and a consultancy.
“With respect to both companies I am the sole director; the first company has been registered for the purposes of conducting legal practice, which practice will not commence until I cease to be a member of Parliament,” Porter wrote. “The second company has been established with respect to possible future writing ventures.
Three years later, Porter has turned a page (and we don’t mean a literal book page — as far as we know, no books have been written). His legal venture, Henley Stirling Lawyers Pty Ltd, has been deregistered.
In a notice published by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in November last year, the regulator flagged it had received an application for voluntary deregistration of Porter’s firm. On New Year’s Day, the deregistration was complete, ASIC documents show.
Presumably, Porter wrapped up the company because he’s begun practising out of Geoffrey Miller Chambers. The nation’s former chief law officer was called to the bar in early 2023 and joined that firm shortly afterwards. That said, the exact reason for his company’s closure is unknown, as Porter did not respond to our requests for more information.
His consultancy firm remains active though, meaning it’s still possible he’ll get that writing project off the ground.
LA diplomats buy a fly whip
Any Joan Didion fan knows the importance of driving in Los Angeles, the city’s one “secular communion” which “requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
Perhaps it was in aid of joining in with this local mysticism that Australia’s diplomats in LA shelled out $130,502.15 for a Range Rover Sport.
Documents released under a freedom of information request (inquiring about the AusTender notice published in December last year) reveal the wrangling over the new car, sent from the UK late last year. Amid the small talk about the weather in Sydney and London, we find that the diplomats pushed for the car as they thought “the Velar is too small for them”. Must be nice!
Plus, they settled on the final specifications (the third they had put together) “due to budget concerns”.
Apart from detecting maybe the merest hint of annoyance in some of this correspondence, we’d hate to know what they’d be driving in LA right now if budget hadn’t been an apparently pressing concern.
ABC spends millions in defamation battles
The ABC still won’t tell us how much its ongoing unlawful termination battle against Antoinette Lattouf has cost (the case has already provided us such gems as “the ABC doesn’t recognise Lebanese people”). Still, we have some idea of how much the broadcaster’s lawyers cost when they duke it out in court regarding defamation.
New documents obtained by Crikey under freedom of information laws reveal the ABC spent $3.3 million on defamation cases from July 1, 2023, through to December 16, 2024 (the date we applied for the information). In that period, six new matters were commenced, although the $3.3 million figure also spans costs for eight matters that had started prior to July 1, presumably including the $390,000 loss to former army commando Heston Russell in October 2023 and the $150,000 settlement with former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann in November 2023.
The ABC has consistently refused to reveal its legal costs in fighting the Lattouf case, but documents previously obtained by Crikey under FOI show that in the 2023-24 financial year, the entirety of its expenditure on Fair Work or unfair dismissal cases was on Lattouf. What proportion of the ABC’s $3.42 million legal spend that financial year was on Lattouf remains unclear, but one Sydney barrister we spoke to estimated that it would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Westaway not a wantaway
The Victorian Liberals have briefly paused their ongoing quest to shake themselves to pieces to select a candidate for the upcoming Prahran byelection, with new leader Brad Battin seeking to claim an early victory by getting it back off the Greens. But the name of the candidate, Rachel Westaway, rang a bell here in the bunker.
Turns out she was one of the many, many appointees to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) during the period the Liberals treated the AAT as a halfway house for former candidates and staffers and other figures associated with the party.
When she was known as Rachel Creek she ran (unsuccessfully) as a Liberal candidate for the NSW upper house in the 2003 state election. And given it’s been a bit of an issue lately, the Vic Liberals must have been impressed with her steadfast loyalty — for example, she didn’t let her many years serving on a body nominally set up to review government decisions stop her from “gatecrashing” a 2019 election event for then Liberal deputy leader Josh Frydenberg and get herself snapped next to one of his posters.
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