Anika Wells speaking at the United Nations on 26 September 2025. The cost of the trip exceeded $100,000. Photo: Anika Wells.
Anthony Albanese has come to the defence of his embattled Communications Minister Anika Wells over her charging taxpayers almost $100,000 to travel business class with two staff to September’s United Nations General Assembly in New York.
As Ms Wells comes under increasing attack over the outlay, and for insisting that it was all within the guidelines, the Prime Minister has confirmed that his office approved the Minister’s last-minute flight changes.
Ms Wells was initially meant to travel with Mr Albanese to New York, but delayed her travel in order to stay in Australia to deal with the fallout from the Optus Triple-0 outages.
Senate Estimates revealed last week that the total bill for the flights was $94,827, including $34,000 for her flight alone.
Additional travel and accommodation costs added another $20,000 to the bill, tipping it way over the $100,000 mark.
Ms Wells was at the UN meeting to deliver a speech on Australia’s world-leading legislation to ban social media use by under-16-year-olds.
The PM has stressed the importance of Ms Wells attending the meeting, but also of her staying back long enough to deal with the Optus issue.
“As a government, we make calls,” Mr Albanese said during an interview on the ABC’s Insiders.
“What happened was I was travelling. We spoke on the Friday night, we spoke again on the Saturday morning before I departed, and made the decision that Minister Wells would stay to deal with these issues.”
He added that while he didn’t personally see the receipts, his office ticked off the travel expense.
“We make decisions as a government … and Minister Wells stayed back … and we spoke on the morning and Minister Wells travelled. It was a very significant event for Australia,” the Prime Minister said.
Ms Wells is also under fire for spending $3000 of taxpayers’ money on a family ski trip to Thredbo, another $3600 to attend a Labor friend’s birthday party in Adelaide, and almost $1000 on just one meal while attending last year’s Paris Olympics Games in her capacity as Sports Minister.
Ms Wells has explained that she was working at all those events, and that the Thredbo and Adelaide trips involved “Paralympian duties”.
Her family joined her in Thredbo under the parliament’s family reunion entitlement, which allows MPs to sometimes travel within Australia with their families.
“Every parliamentarian has family reunion entitlement, which I follow,” Ms Wells told Sky News.
“I followed the guidelines on this occasion. I followed the guidelines on all of the occasions. I will continue to do that.
“Entitlements should be scrutinised. I’m happy for mine to be scrutinised. I’m happy for mine to continue to be scrutinised. But at the end of the day, I don’t write these rules.”
It emerged on Monday (8 December) that Ms Wells has also used $4000 under the family reunion entitlement for her husband to join her at three cricket matches.
The Opposition has called for an independent review of Ms Wells’ expenses, saying there is nothing ordinary about them.
Shadow finance minister James Paterson said Australian families are sitting at their kitchen tables “contemplating their latest electricity bill” and whether or not they’ll be able to afford to put the air conditioner on this summer.
“And as they contemplate that, they’ve learned that there’s a Federal Minister, Anika Wells, who thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to spend $100,000 on return flights from New York City,” Senator Paterson said.
“[And] who thinks it’s okay to spend $1,000 on a fancy meal in Paris, who thinks there’s nothing wrong with spending more than $3000 to travel to Adelaide to attend a birthday party of a friend, and who thinks it’s okay to spend almost $3000 on a ski holiday for her family at Thredbo.
“Every single one of those expenses came at taxpayers’ expense. And Anika Wells is a minister who’s failed the kitchen table test.
“She’s a minister who is not just out of touch with Australians, but she’s out of touch with reality.”
Senator Paterson said all of Ms Wells’ expenses should be referred to the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority for review.
“Now there are other precedents here, too,” he said.
“About 15 years ago, as a minister in the Rudd-Gillard government, Tony Burke spent an eye-watering amount of money [$12,000-plus] to take his family to Uluru for a family holiday.
“When that emerged, several years later, he eventually accepted that that expense was not within community expectations, and he paid the money back.
“But as far as we know, Anika Wells has not even contemplated, let alone offered, paying that money back. And frankly, I think she should think about doing so.”
