Wells’ Big Apple trip suggests something beginning to rot at the core

December 3, 2025 — 4.40pm

Communications Minister Anika Wells’ costly $190,000 jaunt to New York has needlessly distracted attention from the teen social media ban she is overseeing, while also raising questions about government integrity.

Her trip, coupled with the stubborn refusal to release or implement several recommendations of a review of Canberra’s “jobs-for-mates” culture, suggests the wily Albanese government is suffering from a hubris previously unseen.

Communications Minister Anika Wells at the National Press Club on Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The cost of Wells’ ill-judged trip comes amid widespread confusion about the impact of the ban when it comes into effect on Wednesday, December 10. The minister has unhelpfully made herself the centre of attention just as Australians start to concentrate their minds on the issue.

Taxpayers will pay for her trip to New York to sell the teen social media ban after she was forced to delay because of last September’s Optus Triple Zero outage that resulted in three deaths.

She had been scheduled to accompany Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly on the ban, but the Optus scandal forced her to reschedule her trip and she and two staffers then flew commercially to attend the three-day summit. The bill also included a $70,000 dinner to spruik the ban to several world leaders, including the president of the European Commission and prime ministers from Greece, Malta, Fiji and Tonga.

Wells’ jaunt is a fail by a government that, since routing the Coalition last May, has largely avoided own goals.

But even with the opposition crying wolf on any issue - at the time of the Optus outage Opposition Leader Sussan Ley blamed the corporate failure on government and criticised Wells for travelling to New York, saying she should have stayed home – the Albanese government has rarely put a foot wrong.

By last weekend’s prime ministerial nuptials, at least in its own imagination, the party seemed the happiest kingdom of them all. But such confidence can have a tendency to mar judgment.

We have lamented Albanese’s offer of a state funeral for the late Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson as an error of judgment that rewards chicanery, corruption and thuggery and devalues honouring people of national significance.

And when the government received former public service commissioner Lynelle Briggs’ report on cronyism for appointment to government boards in August 2023, Labor kept it secret as it tinkered behind closed doors, while a plethora of jobs went to mates. Briggs’ recommendations that politicians and staffers be blocked from government appointments for six months after leaving public life and ministers be unable to accept jobs in their old portfolios for 18 months were ignored.

The Albanese government has done little to clean up the rorts it inherited: for instance, few have paid any meaningful penalty for the robo-debt scandal.

When the Albanese government first came to power it was partly in recognition of the years of rorting by Coalition governments. Now, in answer to an opposition question on notice, Senate estimates revealed Wells’ injudicious New York splurge and showed how unrestrained power can create newfound arrogance in office.

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