The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, has refused to say if Australia is promising thousands of dollars to Rohingya refugees who agree to return to Myanmar, a country accused of carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Muslim minority.

He told ABC’s 7.30 program Australia provided settlement packages for refugees in Australian-run detention centres to return to their country of origin, and some regions of Myanmar would be safe to return to, but he would not comment on “individual cases”.

Guardian Australia reported on Tuesday up to seven Rohingya may be facing a return to Myanmar from the Australian-run detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

Yahya Tabani, a 32-year-old Rohingya man who arrived in Australia in 2013 but was sent to Manus Island, told Guardian Australia he had no choice but to return. He said he had been promised $25,000 by the Australian Border Force.

Myanmar does not recognise the ethnic minority and has conducted military operations in Rohingya villages that the United Nations’ top human rights official branded “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

Dutton was asked on Wednesday evening if Australia was offering Rohingya refugees $25,000 to return to Myanmar, and if he thought it was safe for them to return to the troubled country.

He declined to answer the question directly, saying: “If people are able to return safely back to a country of origin, or to a region of origin, then we do that.”

When pressed by host Leigh Sales to say whether it was safe for Rohingya to return to Myanmar presently, given close to 400,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, many with bullet wounds and stories of mass killings, he said it depended on the circumstances.

“It depends on the in-country advice at the moment, it depends on the region where that person would want to return to, it depends on their family circumstances,” he said.

“As I say, in some regions people can return”.

After appearing to tire of the questions, Dutton then criticised the ABC for failing to report, in its nightly news coverage, that more than 50 asylum seekers from Manus Island and Nauru would soon be settled in the United States, under a deal struck between the former US president Barack Obama and Australia to take up to 1,250 people.

The ABC’s 7pm news had reported the story, complete with a quote from Turnbull.

“I would have thought the ABC would be jumping up and down for joy with the fact that we’ve got the first 50-odd people off Manus and Nauru, people that Labor had put there, and we’ve not had any drownings at sea for three years,” he said.

“Unfortunately it doesn’t even make the package within the ABC news so, I mean it’s a strange day, but it’s a good day that we’ve got [some] movement [of refugees].

“I hope that we can get more people off [the islands] and do it in a way that doesn’t restart boats and that’s the objective of the government,” he said.

The Manus Island detention centre is slated for closure on 1 October and there is increasing pressure being brought to bear on refugees held there, with buildings shut, medical and other services scaled back and withdrawn, cigarettes banned, and power and water shut off, in an effort to encourage resettlement within Papua New Guinea.

The Nauru processing centre does not have a proposed closure date. But the president of Nauru, Baron Waqa, reaffirmed his country’s position that no refugees would be allowed to permanently resettle in Nauru.