06:43

The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, has spoken to Sky News and delivered his usual bashing up of Labor for supporting the medevac provisions, which he described as “a con”.

One new fact to come out of it: Dutton expects the US to take about 250 more refugees from Australia as part of the refugee swap deal. The US has so far taken just 632 refugees out of the “up to 1,250” it first promised.



“I think we will get somewhere in the order of 250 more will go to the US,” Dutton said.

On medevac, he said that just 13 of the people who had come to Australia have required hospitalisation – about one in 10. But when host David Speers pushed him for how many of the 982 people medically evacuated to Australia under pre-existing provisions had been hospitalised, Dutton couldn’t say.



Dutton said that six of the people who had come under medevac he judges to be of bad character, including one alleged to have fought for the Iranian army, and others allegedly “involved” (how – he didn’t say) in prostitution and criminal syndicates.



At first, Dutton said they were not in detention, but when asked why not, he said they “may well be in detention”. He then said it is immigration minister David Coleman’s job to decide. Finally, he offered this: “I don’t know, is the true answer to it – there’s thousands of cases and I just don’t have that in front of me.”

So, when it was rhetorically convenient to claim that these people are running amok because of Labor’s negligence, he made that claim, and at the slightest scrutiny he admitted he had no idea. Good to know we are pursuing evidence-based policy.



Dutton criticised Kristina Keneally for complaining about the rates of people flying to Australia and then claiming asylum, describing it as a “very small number of cases” in comparison to the millions of people who visit Australia.



He said the problem was not refugees on a plane but rather “her desire to be heard” as part of a “vanity project” to drag Labor’s refugee policy to the left and seize the leadership.