Pressure mounts as second minister faces audit over travel entitlements

Earlier on Friday, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley wrote to Albanese demanding Wells be investigated by the prime ministerial department, and offered to meet to hash out bipartisan reforms to the entitlements system.

“What minister Anika Wells has done is clearly scandalous, and the whole country is reeling from all of the information that they’ve received about what she has done. She has not shown an ounce of contrition. She has not stepped up and said sorry, or she understands what struggling Australians are going through,” Ley told Sky News.

Ley was forced to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s frontbench in 2017 following revelations she had used a taxpayer-funded trip to buy a Gold Coast property.

The independent watchdog’s investigation of Wells, which could take months to complete, has the power to interview ministers about events for which they claimed travel entitlements, check calendars, and inspect metadata to determine if work events were scheduled around social events already locked into the calendar.

The government gave a signal earlier on Friday that reform to the entitlements could be on the table after Albanese had repeatedly ducked responsibility for handling the ordeal, when Health Minister Mark Butler said the IPEA investigation could herald legislative reform.

“I think we should wait for the independent authority to provide some advice,” Butler told Sunrise when asked whether the rules needed to be changed.

“If [reforms] then have to be enacted through legislation, I’m sure that’s what we would do.”

The Parliamentary Business Resources Act requires an independent review every three years, but the last report was finalised in late 2021.

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The government has twice delayed the next review, The Australian Financial Review reports, with it now scheduled to occur in late 2027.

Ley said she wrote to the prime minister to say Wells should be investigated for potential breaches of the ministerial code of conduct, which says ministers’ behaviour should not be wasteful or extravagant with public resources.

“What I want to see is that public trust restored and public confidence in the system, and that’s clearly gone right off the rails under Prime Minister Albanese,” she said.

Ley has until now left attacks on the government’s expenses to her finance spokesman James Paterson as the controversy has dragged on for more than a week.

Asked on Friday about her own expense scandal, Ley said: “I put my hand up, I apologised, and I resigned, and I held myself accountable to the ministerial code of conduct”.

Read more on the expenses saga

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