This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Labor is demanding Peter Dutton release the details of a review into contracts worth almost $500m to manage the Manus Island offshore processing centre, before the Morrison government approves the next one, expected to occur in days.

The home affairs minister has been forced to defend his department’s awarding Paladin, a previously little known firm, a series of contracts to manage the Papua New Guinea off-shore processing centre, without a tender process.

In total, the government has awarded $423m in contracts to Paladin to manage the centre, at a cost of at least $1,600 per day for each refugee and asylum seeker, without food or medical care, with a renewal expected by the end of the month.

But the shadow home affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, is demanding Dutton first release the findings of an Ernst & Young audit into the contracts, which was ordered in March, and expected to take just seven weeks.

The reported $125,000 review was to examine the “tendering and procurement processes” associated with the Paladin contract and was expected to be finished by the end of last month.

Keneally said no moves to renew the contract should be made until the review’s findings were made public.

“Peter Dutton has had five years to find the right service providers for PNG, yet he’s failed at every turn, wasting taxpayers money in the process and also impacting the care of asylum seekers and refugees,” she said.

“Peter Dutton likes to keep secrets but it is unthinkable that he would continue to hide the finding of the Ernst & Young audit report into Paladin from taxpayers, just as he prepares to again award Paladin a multimillion-dollar contract extension.

“Scott Morrison has the ability to overrule Peter Dutton to release the Ernst & Young report to give the community confidence that Mr Dutton is making the right decisions.”

Dutton’s office was contacted for comment. In an interview early last week, Dutton said “the likelihood is there’s a continuation” when he was asked about the Paladin contract.

“I’m not going to comment when the department is in the process of the arrangements,” he told the ABC on 16 June.

Following reporting in the Australian Financial Review, Labor and the Greens pursued the matter in subsequent estimates hearings, where home affairs boss Mike Pezzullo said an “urgent” set of circumstances led to the contract being renewed until July this year.

Pezzullo told the estimates hearing officials turned to Paladin in a closed tender process, after the department was advised by the PNG government in July last year it could not provide the necessary services.

But that too has changed, with the PNG government advising it expects to “cancel or terminate” the contract by the end of the month, as it believes it has the skills and expertise to now run the centre.

“PNG government wants a transparent tender process and most importantly will strongly recommended national content,” PNG’s immigration minister, Petrus Thomas, said in a letter to the home affairs department last month.

“Papua New Guinean companies now have the capacity and expertise to do the job and should be given the opportunity to participate.”

The contract row comes as Labor re-centres its attacks against the government’s border security policies by focusing on the cost to taxpayers and how that money is being spent, while the government ramps up its rhetoric against the medevac legislation it hopes to repeal when parliament resumes next month.

Late last week, Dutton accused women of “trying it on” to reach Australia through the medevac legislation.

“Let’s be serious about this. There are people who have claimed that they’ve been raped and came to Australia to seek an abortion because they couldn’t get an abortion on Nauru,” he told Sky News on 20 June.

“They arrived in Australia and then decided they were not going to have an abortion. They have the baby here and the moment they step off the plane their lawyers lodge papers in the federal court which injuncts us from sending them back.”

But Labor and the Greens have rejected Dutton and the government’s claims the medevac laws were failing. On Friday the Guardian reported that of the nine cases the minister had rejected on medical reasons, the independent panel chosen by the government had overturned just two of those decisions.

Without Labor’s support, the government needs four crossbenchers to agree to repeal the legislation, making Jacqui Lambie the likely deciding vote.