04:02

The former Border Force commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg has written to the Senate inquiry examining Peter Dutton’s handling of the au pair cases.



Quaedvlieg has clarified earlier evidence that he fielded a phone call from Dutton’s office in June 2015 by suggesting his memory of that phone call related to an as-yet unreported case.

Details are a bit sketchy, but Quaedvlieg suggested the new case relates to “a young European female” from “a western or southern European country” and occurred between October 2015 and 2016.



Quaedvlieg repeats his claim that Dutton’s chief of staff Craig MacLachlan said he needed help for the “boss’s mate in Brisbane” whose au pair had been stopped at the airport.

Quaedvlieg said he thought it strange Dutton’s chief of staff would call him for a “low-level transactional issue”.



Quaedvlieg said when he asked Border Force agents about it he was told “boss, this is solid. The comms and her intent are clear. It’s a good stop” – as they confirmed they had good grounds to believe the au pair intended to work in Australia in breach of visa conditions.



Maclachlan then asked “What needs to be done to fix this? Can the boss overturn it?”, and Quaedvlieg suggested they get a departmental brief for ministerial intervention.



Where does this leave us? If there is a fresh au pair case – that’s bad for Dutton. This case can’t be used to argue he mislead parliament, because he wasn’t asked about it, but it does tend to help establish a pattern of behaviour of using the discretionary powers for mates.



Labor can also point to the email from Russell Keag which begins “long time between calls” to say that Dutton did mislead parliament about the original “Brisbane case” in June 2015.

The Senate inquiry has asked for an extension until next Wednesday, so there’s more to see here.