Two folders home affairs minister Peter Dutton claimed in parliament had "confidential" information on Labor MPs Tony Burke and Chris Bowen did not contain any files provided to the minister by his own department, a freedom of information request has revealed.
In early September Dutton was under pressure to disclose the full details over his decisions in 2015 to grant tourist visas to two women who had been refused by his department over concerns they were going to work as au pairs while in Australia.
Dutton, in response, walked in to Question Time with two large folders with "Tony Burke" and "Chris Bowen" written on them, seemingly suggesting he had files on the two MPs, related to visa approvals, when they were the minister for immigration in the previous Labor government.
Dutton took the folders to the dispatch box when he was asked a question by Labor's shadow immigration minister Shayne Neumann about the au pair affair, but when he was asked to table the folders by Bowen, Dutton claimed they had "confidential material" in them.
A freedom of information request published on the transparency website Right To Know shows that the Department of Home Affairs didn't provide any files for those folders to Dutton.
"The Ministerial Services Section of the department has searched the department’s
records, and has confirmed that the department did not provide any documents to the minister for home affairs for the specific purposes of inclusion in two folders, one marked 'Tony Burke' and the other marked 'Chris Bowen'," the department said in a response released on Thursday.
In September home affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo told a Senate committee that the department would not provide information to Dutton on decisions made by his predecessors.
"We would never brief a serving minister on decisions taken, papers rendered or notes provided to a previous minister under any circumstances, but the information that pertains to decisions made by this minister, as a minister of the Crown, he's entitled to," Pezzullo said.
A Senate committee investigating the au pairs ultimately reported that the public may never know the whole story behind the saga, but found Dutton's actions do not reflect community expectations on how the power to grant visas should be used.