CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
After a euphoric week of doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on travel expense scandal surrounding Sports Minister Anika Wells - it seems that the Murdoch newspapers and their right-wing TV channel Sky News have suddenly gone silent.
In what the Federal Opposition was hoping looked like a thread that could be pulled and pulled until the entire Albanese Government came undone - the story has suddenly been deleted from all NewsCorp websites.
This is an interesting turn of events, given the fact that it looked like the right-wing media and Liberal Party had actually landed a punch against the Labor Government.
Anika Well MP insists she was playing well inside the rules of travel expenses after she billed taxpayers thousands of dollars for family members to travel to attend sporting events including three AFL grand finals, two Boxing Day test matches and the Formula One Grand Prix - and join in her at work, in her capacity as Sports Minister.
While many voters would assume politicians are allowed to bring their family with them to see their family's home teams win two grand finals in two seperate codes - the scandal was magnified by the fact that she also spent $100k flying staff with her to New York to speak to the UN.
However, in the mid-Ashes lull, just as the Anika Wells pile-on was growing momentum - NewsCorp dropped the yarn.
This is reminiscent of the time that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was booed at the 2021 Bathurst 1000 on the same day as the NewsCorp Christmas Party, and one of the unpaid interns left holding the fort at Fox Sports accidentally did his job by reporting that the Liberal Prime Minister had lost the support of the bogans in the lead up to a Federal Election.
Similarly, the Bathurst story was also suddenly removed from Fox Sports website and social media after one phone call from the Prime Minister's office.
However, what is different is that this time it's a Labor Minister that NewsCorp are pulling punches on. And even more weird, a young female Labor Minister - which is traditionally the Murdoch media's preferred punching bag when it comes to generating partisan tabloid hysteria.
It appears that the Murdoch journos that landed this scoop may have rushed to print the story without doing a background check on the Labor Minister they were putting to the sword, and perhaps were unaware that Sports Minister Anika Wells is also the Communications Minister, and that the $100k flight to New York was in her capacity as the brave Cabinet Member who took on the big tech platforms that have disrupted the traditional media landscape of newspapers and Foxtel and has rolled out a social media ban for teenagers which in turn has siphoned an entire generation away from their iPhones and put them back in front of a TV and newspaper.
NewsCorp have instead turned their attention to the travel rorts of that powerless ex-Labor senator who wears a burkha.
