TRANSCRIPT:
Communications Minister Annika Wells is facing public scrutiny for her expenses.
Revelations show that her business class flights to New York for her and two staffers cost taxpayers nearly $95,000.
Ms Wells airfares cost $34,427, while her Deputy Chief of Staff’s flights cost $38,166, and an Assistant Secretary for Online Safety incurred $22,236.31 in airfares.
Appearing on Sky News, James Patterson, the Shadow Minister for Cyber Security, is slamming the flight costs as exorbitant.
"I don't even know how you can spend one hundred thousand dollars on return flights to new york city, even if you're flying business class. sometimes first class flights don't even cost that much money."
Ms. Wells is defending her three-day New York trip, which cost taxpayers over $100,000.
She says she was scheduled to travel with the Prime Minister to the U-N General Assembly to deliver a speech on Australia's social media ban in September.
Following the news of the Optus triple zero outage, her departure was delayed, forcing a last-minute re-booking of the New York flights.
She maintains that the travel was for important work and that the expenses adhered to official guidelines.
"I had to be in two places at once. The communications portfolio had two really serious things happening at the same time. Like you said, I was initially meant to leave the Saturday morning with the prime minister the Optus crisis. We only found out about 12 hours earlier than that. We made the decision that I should delay work through that across the weekend, get the independent investigation on foot, and then get to the UN to uphold my commitment."
On ABC's Insiders Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended the government's decision to book these last minute flights.
"You or your office had to approve that flight? of course, of course, and we spoke. We spoke on the morning that Minister wells travelled. It was a very significant event for Australia."
Minister for Social Services Tanya Plibersek stood behind Ms Wells, defending the trip as an important part of the world-first social media ban coming into effect on December 10.
"When we're up against the big tech giants, having that sort of global support really helps us in what we're doing, and the reason we're doing this, of course, is because we've been contacted by so many parents who are worried about the impact that social media has had on their kids or is having on a whole generation of kids. Being in New York was valuable, important. It helps Australia's interests, and it helps us do what we want to do, which is stand up to the big tech giants and protect our kids."
Now Minister Wells is being asked to explain other travel expenses.
In June, Ms Wells attended the Paralympics Australia Adaptive Festival, where she claimed $3000 in taxpayer family reunion entitlements so her husband and children could join her for a weekend at the Thredbo ski resort in June.
In 2024, while serving as Minister for Sports, Ms Wells was sent to Paris for the 2024 Olympic games.
During her time there, Minister Wells was allocated $10,000 for ground transport and authorised to spend up to $1,200 a day on food.
On top of this, she spent $1,000 for a working dinner with the Australian Ambassador to France and a French official.
In a Sky News interview the Minister defended her actions by maintaining that she operated strictly within the rules.
"Viewers can absolutely have an opinion about the rules and parliamentarian entitlements and whether or not they should be changed but my role is to abide by them and that is what I've done."
Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation, Alex Hawke, says that Minister Wells's actions "don't pass the pub test."
He is questioning why taxpayers were billed for expensive meals when she claimed to be only eating "muesli bars" or "falling asleep at the table" in Paris.
"The Minister's defenses don't seem to stack up either. I mean, if the Minister is eating a muesli bar and falling asleep in Paris, then why is the taxpayer being charged for expensive dinners and expensive food and expensive travel if she's not partaking of them? So if her defense is, well, I was working really hard and I didn't eat much and I wasn't really paying attention or asleep at the table, then we could presumably recoup some of that money."
Mr Hawke says the Australian public will not be convinced by the justification that the expenses were simply within the rules.
"I mean, when you look at the expenses of Anna wells, whether it's New York, whether it's Paris, whether it's thread bow, these are expenses that would make the Royals blush. And yet she looks down the camera and says, Oh, well, it's all within the guidelines. Now, I think Australians aren't going to buy that. I think this is these are very expensive trips for relatively junior minister, and she hasn't justified why the expenses were so high, unbelievably high."
The Australian is now reporting that Anika Wells charged taxpayers nearly $9,000 for return flights so her husband could attend the AFL Grand Final three years in a row between 2022 and 2024.
She also spent almost $1800 for her and her husband to attend the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix last year, after receiving four free tickets to the event from the organiser Motorsport Australia.
The Coalition is calling for an independent review into Ms Well's expenses as well as asking her to repay the money.
Ms Wells says she doesn't plan to pay back anything.
