Wells held to a different standard after travel controversies

Forget Euro summer, for the holders of high public office even an Australian winter holiday can become perilous terrain in the court of community expectation.

For Australian politicians, Scott Morrison's ill-fated Hawaii vacation in December 2019 remains a potent reminder of what not to do in a national crisis.

Holidays can come with high stakes and the Telstra outage is only the latest example.

There's a reason Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and many senior ministers tend to keep to Australian shores for their time off.

As Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady is by now acutely aware, even private sector leaders are not immune from the politics of being away from home.

Thanks to the unlucky timing of a family holiday abroad, Brady wasn't able to personally address the Australian public about this week's Telstra outage until more than 48 hours after it began.

The telco's chief financial officer Michael Ackland took charge in her absence and gave multiple updates in that time, but it was obviously not ideal from a PR perspective.

Long shadow for Wells

There was no such delay for Communications and Sport Minister Anika Wells, who was able to return from leave and step up to the cameras in Canberra within hours of being notified of the then-ongoing outage.

Calls for Wells to cut short her family break bagan almost as soon as the crisis emerged.

It's only natural for the public to expect reassurance from the government at such a time, but there's a noticeably sharper political edge when it comes to the pressure on Wells at the moment.

By way of comparison, there wasn't even a whisper of suggestion that Transport Minister Catherine King return from leave to respond to the outage sparking the suspension of regional rail services in her home state of Victoria.

That's not to say King should have been dragged up to the podium — V/Line is run by the state government and the stalled trains pale in significance to a national telco outage where some Triple Zero (000) calls have been compromised.

But for Wells the long shadow cast by the furore around her past travel continues to linger.

The dreaded 'pub test'

Albanese's decision to award Wells the prized sport portfolio in 2022 shocked more than a few envious colleagues, with one remarking to this column at the time that half the cabinet would have "put their hand up" had they known the role was up for grabs.

Wells embraced the position with enthusiasm and became a familiar presence at major sporting events.

Arguably it is a role suited to youthful energy, but those appearances would later form the centrepiece of the travel expenses controversy that engulfed her last year.

Images of Wells joyfully tossing confetti around the MCG in celebration of the Brisbane Lions' AFL grand final win were later used to illustrate what critics felt was an unnecessary degree of largesse.

Notably, the scrutiny of her expenses was sparked by the cost of a trip to the United Nations last September just days after the deadly Optus Triple Zero outage.

An independent review cleared her of wrongdoing in relation to that travel and the sporting events, but Wells's attendance at big matches has since become a rarity.

She skipped the Australian Open, Boxing Day test and recent World Cup, instead mostly appearing at games in her home city of Brisbane.

Some of that reduced schedule can be attributed to her hefty responsibilities in the communications portfolio, in which social media regulation, telco failures and gambling reforms have taken priority.

There has also been a broader reckoning within government about ensuring politicians' travel doesn't fall foul of the dreaded "pub test".

But it's clear the controversies that have, perhaps unfairly at times, clung to Wells have recalibrated the standard against which every comparable decision is judged.

Coalition hasn't got a hit on Labor

Still, even as the Coalition has poked and prodded for weaknesses in Labor's response to the Telstra outage, there is as yet no clear government failure to seize upon.

That is not to say investigations won't later produce material that exposes government shortfalls, but perhaps as a result of the regularity of outages more lessons are being learnt.

Whether the same can be said for Telstra is another matter entirely.

As the government has been at pains to emphasise, the telco is a private company, and a very powerful one at that.

Owning and operating the nation's largest telecommunications network carries extraordinary responsibility.

As work continues on the exact root cause of the outage, Telstra's top brass is already being grilled about their plans to compensate impacted customers and the status of their own lucrative executive bonuses.

Answers will eventually come to light, but one thing is certain: no-one is going to be rushing to book an overseas holiday any time soon.