Coalition gives columnist for the Australian and former Liberal politician influential posts that decide board appointments

The Abbott government has installed the conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen and the former Liberal politician Neil Brown to the nomination panel that appoints board members to the ABC and the SBS.



Albrechtsen, a columnist for the Australian newspaper and a former member of the ABC board, is a vocal critic of the ABC and recently called for its managing director, Mark Scott, to resign.



Brown has called for the ABC to be privatised and has labelled the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage as having “an endemic lack of objectivity and balance”.



"The only solution of any practical value today is the one that should already have been adopted: sell it,’’ Brown wrote.



Along with two other panellists, Albrechtsen and Brown will now decide who gets to sit on the public broadcasting boards until June 2017.

A spokeswoman for the Friends of the ABC, Glenys Stradijot, said the decision to appoint the pair had totally undermined the integrity of the ABC board appointment process.



"The appointment of Janet Albrechtsen and Neil Brown to the panel that recommends appointments to the ABC board is alarming," she said.

"It appears we are in for a return to the bad old days when the Howard government stacked the ABC’s governing board with its political supporters."

The appointments to the nomination panel are made not by the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, but by the prime minister’s office.

The relatively new selection process was ushered in by the then Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy in 2008 in an attempt to end political appointments to the boards of the ABC and SBS.

The nomination panel conducts a merit-based selection process for board members and was originally supposed to exclude political employees and former politicians.

"For too long the process of appointing directors to the ABC and SBS boards has been open to political interference," Conroy said at the time.

"It's time to restore the independence. The new appointment process will ensure that all future appointments to the ABC and SBS boards are conducted in a manner that fosters independence, transparency, accountability and public confidence."