Anika Wells's taxpayer-funded family trips at odds with government's call for restraint
And at a time when many households are struggling to make ends meet, Communications Minister Anika Wells’s expenses saga shows a cavalier disregard for taxpayers and a willingness to game the system for her own and her family’s benefit.
On the upside, Jim Chalmers, to his credit, is foreshadowing integrity and responsibility in next week’s mid-year economic and fiscal outlook statement, including not renewing $300 power bill rebates to households when they expire on December 31. The rebates have cost the budget bottom line about $7bn and could not last.
The Treasurer promises MYEFO will focus on inflation and deliver what the economy needs – spending restraint and medium- to long-term productivity. Good policy is ultimately good politics, and Dr Chalmers’s approach should help the nation and the government.
But Anthony Albanese cannot ignore the damage inflicted by revelations of Ms Wells’s profligate personal spending. A series of taxpayer-funded family trips to Thredbo, the Australian Formula One Grand Prix in Melbourne and several Boxing Day Test matches appears to be within the rules, as the Prime Minister said on Sunday of the Thredbo trip, which was undertaken in connection with the Paralympics as she is Sport Minister.
Ms Wells also billed taxpayers almost $9000 for return flights so that her husband, Finn McCarthy, could attend three consecutive AFL grand finals, with her three children also receiving publicly funded flights to Melbourne on one such occasion. The minister’s main defence – entitlement – will not cut it with voters.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke showed common sense when he repaid taxpayers for a 2012 trip to Uluru over eight years after he billed the commonwealth $8600 for flights for him and his family, conceding the trip “did not meet community expectations”. Ms Wells should think about doing the same.
The rules need to be revisited, and the principle of funding politicians’ family reunions has merit. Politics is hard on families, with long periods away from home. In order to attract younger people with families to politics, especially women, the field needs to be family-friendly.
But funded reunions should not extend to expensive holidays and corporate boxes at sporting events, as barrister and Centre for Public Integrity director Geoffrey Watson argues. Politicians’ incomes are high enough – and rightly so, given the demands of the job – to pay the way of family members. Ms Wells’s extravagant, personal largesse is at odds with the need for fiscal discipline.
What a disappointing week for politics. Barnaby Joyce, after the privilege of serving as deputy prime minister because the people of New England voted National, showed no respect for them, putting his own preference first and decamping to join the fringe-dwellers of One Nation. He is probably hoping for an an easier sinecure in the Senate in future.