The head of the home affairs department, Michael Pezzullo, has refused to answer dozens of questions about Peter Dutton’s use of ministerial discretion to grant visas to two au pairs.

In a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday, the Labor senator Murray Watt suggested Pezzullo was engaging in a “cover-up” by taking all questions on notice and declining to refer any to the departmental staff beside him.

In 2015 a young woman was detained at Brisbane airport, reportedly on the suspicion she was going to conduct paid work while on a tourist visa.

Australian Associated Press has reported the young woman made a phone call to a contact and was “quickly” granted a new visa allowing her to enter the country, through the ministerial intervention of Dutton, now the home affairs minister.

Further details have been stuck in a long-running freedom-of-information battle between AAP and the department.

Pezzullo told estimates he had no personal involvement in the case and initially said the department would not provide details because of concerns about identification.

Watt suggested that explaining why a visa was cancelled – without giving any other details about the individuals – would not identify them.

“A minister of the crown has given advice to the House of Representatives, I’d like to have a look at what he said,” Pezzullo said. “I’d like to look at the facts of the case and then I’ll look if the department can add to the store of facts on the matter.”

Discussions became heated as Watt sought to get dozens of questions on notice, with Pezzullo at times interjecting before the questions were finished.

“Why is it at every stage the blanket is thrown across questions about this incident,” asked Watt. “Why the cover-up?”

The committee chair, Ian Macdonald, objected to the accusation.

Watt said Pezzullo was refusing to ask his officers – sitting at the table – if they had the information Watt was asking for instead of taking it on notice.

“We all know that the end result of this case was that the minister intervened and granted a visa, after some involvement of the minister’s office,” he said.

“I don’t know that,” Pezzullo said.

“I don’t know that,” echoed MacDonald.

Watt referred back to Dutton’s statements from earlier this year, in which he rejected aspects of AAP’s reporting.

“What the minister rejected was any implication that this au pair was his family’s … or known to him,” Watt said. “He didn’t reject the implication that he intervened.

“Mr Pezzullo has made no attempt to find out answers.



“This comes after a long-running FOI battle to extract information that his department has resisted.”

In the hearing Pezzullo faced several hours of questions on high-profile cases involving the home affairs department, including the almost 200 Commonwealth Games athletes who have sought asylum and calls for white farmers from South Africa to receive “special attention”.

Under questioning from the Greens senator Richard Di Natale, Pezzullo also said his department gave no advice to Dutton about African gang crime scaring Melbourne residents away from restaurants, as the minister suggested.

Pezzullo said he gave ministers lots of advice but “not in relation to threats to dining”.