FULLE SPEED AHEAD
She’s Australia’s youngest federal minister, has three children under six and is chronically ill but Brisbane’s Anika Wells has always approached life at a rapid pace
When Anika Wells ran her first half marathon and faced the steep on-ramp to Brisbane’s Story Bridge, her father advised her to sprint up the hill. Going faster will be easier than doing it at a slower pace. It’s physics. And it worked. “Ever since then I’ve applied it to everything,” she says.
Youngest female MP when first elected in 2019. First MP in the southern hemisphere to give birth to twins while in office. Now aged 37, Wells is the nation’s youngest serving federal minister, with carriage of the aged care and sport portfolios. Young, ambitious, energetic, and chronically ill.
Wells has only referred to having a “serious auto-immune disease” in passing a handful of times since being elected. “I was already a woman … we had a newborn, I didn’t feel like adding this to the mix was going to give anyone a sense that I was very capable and up to the job,” she says. “The essentials are what you need to know, which is that I am immunocompromised, that I have chronic disease, that it’s incurable.”
She is required to go to hospital to be hooked up to an IV drip for a few hours every eight weeks for a double dose of medicine.
This renders her largely asymptomatic.
Fatigue and rheumatoid arthritis are the main impacts on her life from day-to-day.
Wells is yet to hear a compelling case about why she should go into more detail than that. Surely it’s possible to have a sophisticated conversation on how people with chronic illness navigate life without veering into the voyeuristic. And in the thrust of the “political colosseum” where being vulnerable can be seen as weakness and Question Time sledges oft undetected by microphones can sear flesh to the bone, Wells doesn’t want her illness to be weaponised.
“I think that we all do better if we are all honest about our vulnerabilities,” Wells says.
“So I am trying to be courageous about it, but I think even if I try to do that, I’ve been in politics long enough to know that that’s not always how the colosseum (sees it).”
This disease has ended political careers elsewhere and Wells says there’s a possibility it is what could ultimately force her out.
Perhaps it is then, in the sunset of a political career when Wells will feel ready to lay on the public record the specifics and put the name to her condition.
For now the focus is on administering the largest reform to Australia’s aged care sector in years, a responsibility coloured by a lived experience – in her own nook – of the machinations of the healthcare system.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Are you actually talking to healthcare workers about what it’s like.’ You would be shocked by how often I’m talking to healthcare workers in their workplace,” Wells says.
“Being a healthcare patient and minister is good for keeping things honest about what it’s like out there.”
I think it’s only in this (treatment) room that I can actually, properly contemplate how serious it is
Wells, by her own admission, doesn’t want to be the “flag-bearer” for others with her condition. The disease “feels like a stranger”. So she attempts, to her detriment, to ignore it.
“I don’t like it, I didn’t invite it, I don’t welcome it,” Wells says. “I just pretend I don’t have it until the high watermark where I have to confront it.
“That didn’t work so well in the beginning.” The beginning was in the latter half of 2016, when Wells was 20 weeks pregnant.
There had never been symptoms before except that one time, in hindsight, when she was on her gap year in France.
Pregnancies are a “foreign thing for anyone going through it the first time”, so Wells ignored the “pretty debilitating” symptoms for six weeks.
Maybe it was a typical difficult pregnancy and not something sinister, she argued.
Wells’s husband Finn, and the health professionals once she was at the hospital, disagreed.
Her symptoms were enough to warrant testing for cancer within the first 48 hours, with
results within 72 hours pointing to a “moderately aggressive” chronic illness that had been dormant until recently.
But the baby meant treatment options were limited between week 26 and week 37 of the pregnancy, when her daughter Celeste arrived.
In hospital she watched coverage of the women’s marches, amid the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, and concluded Martin Luther King Jr and Theodore Parker before him may have been wrong.
Maybe the “arc of the moral universe” didn’t always bend towards justice.
And as the canon of Wells’ political origin story goes, it was resolved then in January 2017, with her three week-old-daughter “in one arm and an IV in the other” that it was time to take politics by the horns.
“That was sort of the crystal moment when I thought, ‘No, I am going to run (for political office)’,” she says. “I don’t know when, and where, but I’m not going to sit back and assume things will get better.”
Luck and timing, she hoped, would sort the rest out.
Former treasurer Wayne Swan decided he was done. It was announced on February 10, 2018, that his parliamentary career, which included steering Australia through the GFC, would end at the 2019 election.
Swan had been the Member for Lilley, on and off (he won in 1993, lost in 1996, returned in 1998), for 24 years.
He said the right person to represent the growing inner-north Brisbane electorate should be “a young woman with energy and smarts”.
“Our area is changing rapidly and being repopulated with young families. It’s therefore time to hand the baton to a fresh, energetic, young candidate who embodies the changing nature of the electorate,” Swan said at the time.
Swan didn’t mention Wells, who had worked on his election campaigns, by name. But it was clear she had been anointed as his preferred successor.
Griffith University political commentator Dr Paul Williams said at the 2019 election Wells was a “stellar” pick who had been preselected “not just for a Labor seat but as a future Labor minister”.
“Basically she’s impossible to beat,” he said. Except she nearly was.
Wells was a relative unknown, taking over from a longstanding, high profile MP, in an election where federal Labor was flogged by voters.
It took a white-knuckled 10 days of counting and watching postal ballots trickle in before it was decided she had scraped in by 1229 votes. A razor-thin margin of 0.64 per cent.
The win, though narrow, was a testament to the power of the “on-the-ground campaign”.
All shoe leather and “sprinting up the hill”. Pretending the disease isn’t flaring up due to stress until you’re admitted to hospital, then it gets hard to ignore.
In total she spent about 30 days in hospital between 2017 and clinching the seat.
She didn’t skip events by choice “to get more rest or because it wasn’t very accommodating to active disease” because that would mean losing opportunities to meet voters, have a chat, and convince them she was committed.
“So it was hard, but if I hadn’t done all that I might have lost.”
“Maybe I’d have acquired a healthier life, but it would be less meaningful.”
Being elevated to the frontbench as a secondterm MP is unusual.
It felt “too good of an event to happen” so Wells “didn’t quite trust it” until the votes were in. “Until you live through it you don’t appreciate the ferocity of winners and losers that sorting out a ministry is, because any number of people have very good experience and worthiness,” she says.
Luck and timing had sorted it out.
Then the Prime Minister rang and told her what portfolios she would have responsibility for.
“And I just did not sleep for three nights because of the enormity of the task,” she says.
Wells was born in 1985 in Brisbane to parents Kent, an accountant, and Deb, an administrator at an aged-care home and grew up in Bulimba with younger brothers Adam and Kym.
She was an outspoken, high-performing student as newspaper archives prove.
On March 1, 2002, she appeared – alongside three other Year 12 Moreton Bay College students – in The Courier-Mail reflecting on “how the supposedly fairer sex was trouncing boys (academically) in school”.
Directly under this piece was an article headlined “MP blasts aged-care fire safety”.
Anthony Albanese, in his capacity as the Opposition spokesman for ageing and seniors at the time, was furious the federal government had done “little to ensure that nursing homes improve their safety standards”.
Wells would go on to work in aged care homes just a few years later as a part-time kitchen assistant, for a period alongside her mother who manned the reception desk at one facility.
She studied law at Griffith University, and was involved in student politics and Young Labor.
This collection of interests took her to a National Union of Students annual conference in Ballarat in 2005, where she would meet her eventual husband Finn McCarthy, who was from South Australia. McCarthy, now a lobbyist at communications and advocacy group SEC Newgate, says he had worked out within months that she should run for parliament. It was a long wait.
“The moment she finally decided in her brain what we all knew – which was she was going to run – she worked harder than I’ve seen many people work, she did all the things that she could,” he says.
“I think from that moment on, I could not be prouder of her.”
He was aware her illness would make the tilt for political office harder, but what McCarthy didn’t appreciate at the time was “her complete power to compartmentalise her life”.
“It’s really hard I think, for her and probably many others, to think ‘I should probably manage it’ because you also want to say, ‘Well, it’s going to be there every day of my life, why should I think about it.’
“So she’s very skilled at, I would say, at ignoring some of the lessons of her body. But it does mean that her loved ones and those close to her, it’s important that we notice it and say, ‘You need a break’, or ‘When is your next infusion? When is it in your diary?’”
After Celeste in 2017, Wells and McCarthy added the “quaran twins” Ossian and Dashiell to the mix in October 2020. “There is nothing calm about our life,” McCarthy says of their Chermside household. “No one or nothing can prepare you for going from roughly 20 weeks of the year in Canberra but mostly based in and around a 10km radius, to … I guess she’s home about three nights a week on average.
“It’s a balancing act.”
Under doctors’ orders Wells should be in hospital for an infusion every eight weeks, though this is hard to do when ministerial travel, parliamentary sittings, or the local state high school graduation ceremony is allowed to take precedence in the diary.
Outside of hospital Wells can “forge ahead”. But sitting within the walls of the ward she cannot escape “not just the seriousness, but the permanency” of the illness.
“I think it’s only in this room that I can actually, properly contemplate how serious it is,” Wells says. Because there is no cure, not yet.
So she must repeat the cycle – of turning up to the appointment, for a process that takes between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours depending on the state of her veins on the day, to get a double dose of a lifesaving drug.
She’ll need to check in with the specialist every six months so they can determine if the treatment regimen is working fine.
The doctor will file paperwork with the drug company to apply for “act of grace” dose on top of the one funded through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
She’s been through the trial and error period of figuring out which treatments work and which drug cocktails don’t.
Sometimes, but not at the moment, she gets rheumatoid arthritis symptoms in her feet which is “just something that happens”. The pain can be fairly constant.
Right after the diagnosis Wells’ specialist told her she could no longer go on long runs as it would be too wearing on the body, and would inflame the disease.
She’s allowed 5km stints now and has, on the doctor’s sign-off, done a couple of 10km runs to date. The medication acts as fuel in her tank so she “struggles with the length of the days in week seven compared to week one”.
But she is also adamant she will do what she wants, come “hell or high water”.
“The high water is all of my life choices – like having small children, choosing a job that requires 24/7 commitment and getting to be a minister as fast as I have,” Wells says.
“And the hell is the disease, but come hell or high water it’s just what I’ve set out to do.”
Running was a sport Wells picked up in her 20s. It doubled as an activity she could do with her father Kent, who had done triathlons and marathons through her childhood. Saturdays at the local Park Run became a ritual for the pair. Wells decided she wanted to get a half marathon under her belt and her father helped her train. A few months out from the 2014 Brisbane Marathon Festival he offered to run the race with her. From the starter’s gun a cracking pace was set and Wells wasn’t sure she could sustain it. But it was the pace the pack had decided.
As the on-ramp to the Story Bridge loomed large about 4kms into the 21.1km run Wells recalls her father telling her to sprint up the hill.
“It just seems counterintuitive, it’s a hard thing you have to do so why would you do it at absolutely full tilt rather than pacing yourself,” she says. “But actually physics tells you that you will have better form for doing it. You’ll do it faster and you will accomplish more.”