With her eye-watering flight costs, Wells has handed her critics the perfect weapon

3 months ago 19

In Canberra, the most dangerous political scandals are never the labyrinthine ones requiring whiteboards and flowcharts. It’s the simple ones, the ones voters can explain to each other in a supermarket queue, that bring ministers undone.

Peter Reith’s phone card. Bronwyn Bishop’s helicopter. Sussan Ley’s impulse property buy. George Christensen’s Philippines holidays. You don’t need a PhD in public administration to recognise when something smells off.

Anika Wells’ near $100,000 jaunt to New York fits squarely, and dangerously, into that canon. How it’s handled from here will be telling.

Communications Minister Anika Wells at the event in New York to promote the social media ban, September 24.

For a minister who once told Australians she was “new” to the fiendishly complicated telecommunications portfolio, Wells has stumbled into the most uncomplicated political mess imaginable. No need for a briefing note or a departmental explainer. It’s three return tickets to Manhattan – one each for her, a deputy chief of staff, and an online safety bureaucrat – clocking in at an eye-watering $94,828.

The timing? Even worse. While Optus customers were discovering that Triple Zero sometimes meant nothing doing, the communications minister was wheels-up to the United Nations General Assembly. It was a trip designed to sell Australia’s world-first social media ban to global leaders and, the government insists, bask in international attention. Instead, she’s soaking in talkback radio and tabloid outrage.

A long-scheduled National Press Club address did nothing to resolve anyone’s reservations about her judgment. She boasted the transparency of her government’s system was the reason we knew about it. The trip was delayed because of the Optus crisis, she said, which more than likely sent the plane fares soaring.

“The reason you know all those things is because we’re transparent about them, and we will disclose them, and we’ll continue to disclose information about that trip through the usual processes,” Wells said of her $34,427 return flight to the US, appearing less than impressed she’d been subjected to such impertinence from the fourth estate.

“I’ve answered your question,” she replied to a follow-up. Stressing something falls within the guideline has rarely been a successful answer.

The irony is that this was supposed to be Wells’s defining week, the crescendo to months of work on the government’s world-first social media ban. She was positioned to reap the political glory for an election-year showpiece or shoulder the blame should it go off like a misfired firecracker. That was the battlefield she had prepared for. Instead, she’s been ambushed by her own travel diary.

Her failure to craft a coherent line about her government’s lack of courage on gambling reform also gave the impression she’d been rattled by the unwanted attention.

Communications Minister Anika Wells at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

“Thank you for the questions that I’ve heard from you several times in the months running up to now,” she replied to a question from The Guardian. If she thinks they’re the enemy, maybe she should think again.

Wells finds herself fighting on two fronts: the Triple Zero public-safety fiasco at home and a growing perception that she might be a little too comfortable drawing on the public purse. The government insists the UN trip “garnered worldwide attention” for Australia’s online safety laws. The opposition insists the flights could fund a small mortgage deposit. Both things, unhelpfully for her, may be true.

The trouble is that Wells handed critics the perfect weapon when she tried to reframe the Optus debacle by describing herself as a “new minister”. It was meant to deflect political heat; it instead highlighted her vulnerability. The rookie-card argument may work when you’ve inherited someone else’s mess. It collapses when followed by a business-class bill of nearly $100,000. Whatever the diplomatic justification for the trip, the optics are terrible.

The Coalition’s attack lines write themselves. Should holes be poked in her social media ban in the weeks to come, she risks again being put under the spotlight.

And that’s the real danger: this is a scandal with Velcro. It sticks. It’s the kind of transgression that buries itself into the public narrative of government excess, no matter how well-intentioned the original purpose of the trip.

Wells has spent the past few months wrestling control of a portfolio that can humble even the most experienced ministers. But it’s not the complexity of telecommunications that threatens her standing; it’s the simplicity of a travel bill. A real-world reminder that, in politics, the biggest falls often begin with the most comprehensible numbers.