An Australian minister was yesterday under mounting pressure to formally explain why he personally intervened to help au pairs from France and Italy after their tourist visas were canceled.
Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, the driving force behind a bitter Liberal Party coup that unseated Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister last week, has strongly denied any wrongdoing.
However, the scandal is deepening, with an Australian Senate committee inquiry due to scrutinize his decisions next week at the request of opposition politicians.
In the first case, Dutton, then immigration minister and known for his support of hardline policies, used his discretionary powers to free a Frenchwoman from detention in November 2015 and allow her to stay in the country.
The move was made after an appeal to his office by Australian Football League boss Gillon McLachlan, documents released under transparency laws showed.
The woman was reportedly planning to work as a live-in babysitter for a relative of McLachlan, but did not have the proper paperwork when she arrived.
National broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Corp and other media said Dutton’s intervention also helped a wealthy family that was also a Liberal Party donor.
The opposition Labor Party has been demanding to know whether their political donations influenced his decision to free the woman.
A second case emerged on Thursday involving an Italian au pair.
That woman was detained at Brisbane Airport, also in 2015, because Australian Border Force officials believed she planned to work as a babysitter in breach of her tourist visa.
Dutton overruled the decision, which benefited the family of a man he used to work with when he was a police officer before entering politics, according to leaked documents cited by local media.
Critics have contrasted the cases with Dutton’s unwavering commitment to keeping asylum seekers in overseas detention under Canberra’s immigration policies.
However, Dutton yesterday insisted that they were “common-sense” decisions.
“I make a decision that I believe is in the best interest of our country. I do it every day with visas,” Dutton told commercial radio 2GB. “That’s the whole reason for ministerial intervention, because you believe the department has made a decision that is not right.”
He added in a separate statement that he has dealt with hundreds of representations over immigration matters every year.
“I consider cases on their merits. Any suggestions cases are determined on any other basis, including whether I knew the individual who referred the matter, is completely ridiculous,” he said.
However, Labor immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann said the public would be stunned by the “troubling pattern” of interventions.
“It’s not about the powers, it’s about the process,” Neumann said, adding that most people would have expected the au pairs to be “put back on a plane and deported.”
Dutton launched a leadership challenge against moderate Turnbull last week, but was defeated by Scott Morrison in the race to become prime minister.
Senior Labor lawmaker Anthony Albanese suggested that the leaks about the au pair cases were “payback for his role in wrecking the Liberal Party last week.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS