A ritual of outrage

Every few years Australian politics performs the same ritual. The cameras swing. The spreadsheets surface. A minister’s travel claims appear on breakfast television while presenters adopt the tone usually reserved for natural disasters and sex scandals. The public is invited to pre-judge as media pore over flights, hotels and meals, line by line, and pass sentence.

It is happening again now. This time, the offering is Communications Minister Anika Wells, who is also the Minister for Sport.

Rort spotting has become a national sport. It flatters our appetite for judgement, our urge to lop tall poppies, our fondness for pearl clutching and pile-ons. Voyeurism, muck raking, gratuitous moralising and finger wagging are bundled together and sold as accountability. Everyone gets to dish it out.

The timing problem

The timing matters. In early December, Australia’s under 16 social media regime comes into force. Platforms now carry legal obligations to prevent children from holding accounts. Being on social media under 16 remains legal but they can’t have an account, a puzzling sort of prohibition in that usage is what counts, but the regulatory shift is significant. It touches millions of households, phones, tablets and schoolyards.

It reshapes how young Australians talk, learn, organise and disappear into their screens.

It also raises hard questions. How does age verification work in practice? Who stores the data? For how long? What happens when a thirteen year old uses a VPN, borrows an older sibling’s login, or scrolls content without an account and without moderation?

Those questions barely register.

Instead, the national conversation fixates on Wells’s travel.

The numbers are crisp and appetising. Nearly one hundred thousand dollars in flights to New York for official work. Family travel to Thredbo timed around Paralympics meetings. Allowances claimed when her husband attends the AFL Grand Final and the Boxing Day Test, events the Sports Minister is expected to attend. Michelin listed dinners in Paris during the Olympics, photographed plates gleaming under restaurant lights while families at home juggle power bills and choose between dental work and groceries.

The optics are dreadful. You do not need an economist to feel it in the gut.

But optics are not the same as scale, nor context.

Optics versus scale

ABC analysis places Wells thirty fourth for family reunion travel, seventeenth for international travel, and twenty third overall among federal MPs. She is not the biggest claimant. She is not an outlier. Her expenses pass through the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority system established after Sussan Ley’s resignation in 2016, rules designed to replace discretion with transparency.

Comparable claims by other ministers and opposition figures sit quietly in the same database. They do not lead bulletins. They do not dominate panels. They do not get transformed into stand ins for a wider narrative of political rot.

Trade Minister Don Farrell, for example, tops the family travel ledger in the most recent twelve month ABC analysis, claiming forty eight thousand one hundred and seventy eight dollars in 2024 to 25. The database notices. The outrage machine does not.

But Wells it is.

There are two explanations, and neither is accidental.

The first is structural. Parliamentary expenses are highly readable. Everyone knows what a flight costs. Everyone has an opinion about holidays and sport. The moral arithmetic is instant and gratifying. Complex policy, by contrast, requires time, diagrams, caveats and an admission that outcomes are uncertain.

The second is political convenience.

Why this minister

Wells is young. She is a woman and the mother of three small children, including twins born while in office. She holds the sports portfolio, which is a permanent optics trap. Attend sporting events and you are a bludger. Skip them and you are un Australian. She is also widely seen as one of Anthony Albanese’s trusted ministers, which makes her a convenient proxy target for an opposition desperate to change the channel from its own disarray.

Former Labor leader Bill Shorten calls it a pile on. The phrase sticks because it captures the sensation. A sudden convergence of outrage, repetition and momentum that overwhelms proportion.

What disappears under the pile on matters.

What disappears under the pile-on

The under 16 social media regime arrives quietly. Passed in late 2024 and commenced a year later, it now reshapes daily life with barely a murmur of sustained scrutiny. Supporters frame it as child protection. Critics do not deny harm. They question mechanism.

The law places responsibility on platforms, not parents or children. But enforcement depends on age assurance systems that remain loosely defined. Mandatory verification risks creating new reservoirs of sensitive personal data. Children can still access social media content without accounts, often without parental controls or meaningful moderation. Early signs suggest the obvious workarounds already circulate. VPNs, shared devices, burner profiles traded like contraband in school corridors.

These are not fringe objections. Youth advocates, technologists and civil liberties groups raise them publicly. They ask for impact assessments, privacy guarantees and enforcement clarity. Their concerns sink beneath the travel coverage.

This is not coincidence. It is design.

The dopamine economy

Australia now operates inside a type of dopamine economy. Outrage is not a by-product of the media cycle. It is the fuel that keeps it running.

In this economy, attention is harvested in short bursts. Stories are selected not for their importance but for their capacity to trigger immediate emotional response: anger, envy, disgust, moral certainty. Parliamentary expenses are perfect units of outrage. They are visual, numerical, personal and instantly comprehensible. A flight cost can be felt. A dinner bill can be judged. A face can be fixed to the offence.

Complex policy does not travel as well. It requires patience, context and uncertainty. It demands the reader sit with unanswered questions rather than deliver a verdict. In the dopamine economy, that is a design flaw.

The system rewards stories that can be refreshed hourly without changing substance. Each update produces a small chemical hit: a new total, a new receipt, a new talking head. Panels can recycle the same moral script all day without exhausting it. Social media amplifies the effect, turning outrage into performance. To opt out is to risk appearing indifferent or complicit.

This is not simply a failure of journalism. It is a rational response to incentives. Algorithms privilege engagement over understanding. Advertisers pay for eyes, not insight. Outlets that slow down lose clicks to those that speed up. The market teaches everyone the same lesson: provoke first, explain later, if at all.

The consequence is not just shallow debate. It is strategic blindness.

While the public is encouraged to litigate a minister’s dinner bill, it is distracted from decisions that cannot be easily visualised or tallied. Defence commitments measured in decades rather than receipts. Regulatory regimes whose harms emerge slowly and unevenly. Industries whose power lies precisely in their ability to avoid becoming a single, scandalised face.

The Wells affair fits the model perfectly. It offers a clear target, a finite set of numbers, and an endless supply of judgement. It drains public anger without threatening the structures that generate far greater harm and far greater cost.

This is how distraction functions as governance. Not by hiding information, but by overwhelming it with something easier to feel.

The scrutiny that never arrives

The pattern extends beyond Wells. While her expenses dominate the cycle, scrutiny fades elsewhere. AUKUS advances with remarkably little interrogation. Retired Rear Admiral Philip Mathias warns that the United Kingdom struggles to sustain a nuclear submarine program at the required scale. The United States fails to meet its own Virginia class build targets. BAE Systems carries a long history of delays and overruns. A three hundred and sixty eight billion dollar defence commitment attracts less sustained questioning than a minister’s dinner bill.

These critiques are not fringe. They go to feasibility. At another time, they would dominate coverage. Here, they barely land.

A portfolio built for conflict

There is a deeper irony at work. Wells is not just caught in an optics storm. She occupies one of the most structurally conflicted portfolios in Canberra. Sport and Communications.

In an era where elite sport depends on gambling advertising, broadcast deals and betting product fees, the same minister is tasked with regulating online harm, gambling promotion and digital platforms. That contradiction is not personal. It is institutional.

It helps explain why Wells absorbs relentless optics warfare while the industries she nominally oversees remain largely untouched.

If the Wells affair tells us anything, it is not merely about distraction. It reveals how deeply sport, gambling, media and the state intertwine, and how concentrating those levers of influence in a single portfolio renders genuine reform politically hazardous.

The larger shark

That is the larger shark circling just beneath the surface.

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Coda: The small scandal and the big silence

The Wells affair is sold as a morality tale. It is nothing of the sort. It is a diversion, a brightly lit cul de sac down which public anger is safely herded while the real business of power carries on untroubled.

We are invited to count flights and dinners because they are legible. We are encouraged to argue about optics because optics are cheap. They cost nothing to fix and nothing to forget. Meanwhile the structures that shape lives, budgets and liberties advance in near silence.

This is how modern politics manages consent. It feeds the public small transgressions and withholds the large ones. It offers us a minister to judge so we do not have to judge a system.

A country that spends weeks litigating a dinner bill while committing hundreds of billions to defence contracts it cannot audit is not serious about accountability. A media culture that can recite a travel ledger from memory but cannot explain how gambling money saturates national sport is not curious. It is complicit.

Nothing about this episode is accidental. It is how power prefers to be examined. Loudly, narrowly and on its own terms.

The scandal is not that Anika Wells follows the rules. The scandal is that the rules attract more attention than the forces that wrote them.

That is not scrutiny. It is stagecraft.

And it is precisely why the next question matters more than the last one. Not who travelled where, or who paid for what. But who really governs the space where sport, money and influence now meet.

Because that is where the real story begins.

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Footnote:

Since publication, Attorney-General Michelle Rowland, who previously held the Communications portfolio and oversaw the development of the under-16 social media regime, has herself become the focus of heightened media scrutiny. This does not weaken the argument advanced here. It strengthens it. The pattern remains consistent: at moments when major regulatory shifts take effect, public attention is redirected toward individual ministers and procedural controversies rather than sustained examination of policy design, enforcement feasibility, industry influence and long-term consequences. Whether the face of the controversy is Wells or Rowland, the underlying mechanism is unchanged. Personalised outrage substitutes for structural accountability.

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