As a lawyer, Penfold had an unusually low level of trial experience for a Supreme Court nominee, which was why the Bar Association and the legal profession more broadly went completely apeshit when she was nominated, and strongly protested her nomination to a level that we haven’t really seen with any other judge here in living memory, and spurred a major push to reform the nomination process. She was before being nominated, quite simply, an unqualified bureaucrat.

The capital is not short of senior lawyers - indeed, Richard Refshauge SC, appointed at the same time as Penfold, was a brilliant choice. My suggestions for the second pick would be, if the intention was to choose a woman (perhaps the only thing Penfold had in her favour) high-profile barrister Pamela Coward or else perhaps ACT Bar Association president George Brzostowski, but that’s hardly the limit of the choices they had at hand - Penfold was a pick right out of left field.

I claimed that she would be unqualified and a conservative, and I was proved right when her first decision was the sort of thing that if she were a man would see her nominated for an Ernie Award, and might well see her nominated for an Elaine this year - she wrote off a convicted rapist who broke into a woman’s home and raped her in her bed as “on the lower end of the scale” and sentenced him to a disgracefully minor sentence. She comes as the latest in a long line of conservative judges who simply do not get sexual assault, and the fact that she’s a woman makes it all the worse.

“Prejudiced dickhead?” Save your bile, and actually go read some “facts” about Penfold.