I blame melodie entirely for my problems regarding Synaptic.
Back in the bad old days, when we were still young and innocent, the lost tribe of OB was given its marching orders, yea verily expelled, from the fabled lands of PCLOS. Banished, no less. Lost and bewildered we trekked across the trackless wastes, stumbled through foreign forums and dabbled in mysterious distros. Before you knew it the ways of Arch and Sabayon had infiltrated and bent our minds. By the time we reached the Promised Land of Debian - well, speaking for myself of course, melodie was bewitched by the siren call of 'buntu and we lost her in the shadows - all thought of GUI had been banished and we were pupils of the command line. Long live "apt-get", and his/her partner "apt-cache". All worship the Terminal, and abide by the the vow of "--no-install-recommends".
Anyway, short story long - no idea about Synaptic anymore - haven't used it in ages. Even removed it from Scorpio.
Oh, by the way, the "au" repo I'm now using is one I used to use a while ago -
## AU
deb http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian testing main contrib non-free
It's a secondary mirror - don't know what happened to the Debian mirror - but this one is way faster. It's actually my service provider as well, so it should be good!! Well, service provider once removed - don't ask!
Anyway I'll probably include that in the next mini-upgrade, but maybe not as default - if you going to list a source it may as well work!