Paris, skiing, and the Boxing Day Test: Why Minister For Good Times should go (but won’t)
Australians struggling to pay the bills and who would love to be able to take the kids for a ski or go to the Boxing Day Test see this as snout in the trough behaviour, writes James Morrow.
Australia is a country that loves its rules, even more so the whole set of unwritten guidelines that keep society from grinding to a halt.
This is why there is little to no social stigma attached to losing your license to the nation’s silent army of unforgiving speed cameras.
But don’t follow the shout at the pub or put something in your neighbour’s bin before sundown on bin night and you may as well have confessed to war crimes.
Which brings us to the spectacular self-immolation of Labor’s new Minister for Good Times Anika Wells who, if this country had a half competent opposition, would now be going around with the word “embattled” hung around her neck.
Because Wells has violated one of the most important rules of a high trust society like Australia.
Namely, just because you can does not mean you should.
Or to put it another way, don’t take the proverbial.
Yet over the past few days we have seen example after example of Wells doing just that.
Forget the $35,000 premium tickets to France (who on earth is the government using to make its travel bookings?).
If Wells had flown Qantas, where long haul business class passengers are often given a bowl of nuts like you’d see on the bar of a suburban golf club by way of a “starter” course before dinner, you could argue that she suffered enough.
But in truth it is really more the small scale stuff that rankles.
The $3,000 official trip to Adelaide, paid for by the taxpayer, that coincidentally allowed her to attend the 40th of a mate.
Among the “official” business was a meeting with Trade Minister Don Farrell (well, ok) and the newly elected member for the South Australian seat of Sturt (couldn’t they all have caught up in Parliament House?).
The family ski trip to Thredbo under family reunion rules allowed under parliamentary guidelines.
And now revelations that the taxpayer was on the hook for $4,000 in flights so that Wells’ husband Finn McCarthy could join her more than once in a corporate box at the cricket (including to see the Boxing Day tests in 2022 and 2024).
Finn, it is worth noting, is a lobbyist turned government relations adviser for a major bank, so we can only imagine that he makes a nice contribution to the family bank account on top of the $400,000-plus Wells draws down via her ministerial salary.
Which begs the question, wouldn’t it have been easier for them to simply put their hands in their own pocket if they wanted a ski weekend with the kids, to go to the cricket, or surprise a friend by turning up to their big birthday bash?
Again, none of this appears to have violated any rule or regulation, but ordinary Australians struggling to pay the bills and who would love to be able to take the kids for a ski or go to the Boxing Day Test see this as absolute snout in the trough behaviour, the sort of thing that makes the entire political class reek.
One former MP, having watched Sky News’s Andrew Clennell demolish Wells over the course of an excruciating 26 minute interview Sunday morning, told this column that there were plenty of times she could have scheduled meetings to coincidentally be places she wanted to be for private events.
“I never did, because I’d rather pay the $600 in airfares or whatever than have it come out, and it always does, and have it be an issue,” she said.
Meanwhile precedent suggests that Wells should fall on her sword.
Whether it is Bronwyn Bishop’s famous and long regretted chopper trip or former NSW Transport Minister Jo Haylen’s use of a taxpayer funded car and driver to take her pals on a Hunter Valley piss-up, these sorts of stories tend to make things untenable.
Yet for a variety of reasons, including a feckless opposition and a smug prime minister who so far is choosing to hide behind legalisms and wide but shallow support in the polls, Wells is unlikely to have her (taxpayer funded) wings clipped.
And the gulf between ordinary Australians and their leaders, to say nothing of the high trust society we once enjoyed and where we are now heading at a rate of knots, grows ever larger.
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