Secret emails reveal Peter Dutton defied advice to grant visa to au pair of AFL boss’s relative
PRESSURE is mounting on hardline Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to explain why he still overturned a French nanny’s deportation despite receiving advice from border control chiefs that she planned to work illegally.
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HARDLINE Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was told by border control chiefs that a French nanny planned to work illegally — but still overturned her deportation, explosive documents reveal.
Leaked emails, revealed by the Herald Sun at 11.27am yesterday, expose frantic lobbying by AFL boss Gillon McLachlan and one of his senior executives to stop the imminent deportation of the au pair, who officials said had flown in to Australia on a tourist visa but intended to work for Mr McLachlan’s second cousin, a grazier.
Pressure is mounting on Mr Dutton to explain why he intervened against his department’s advice to grant a visa to Alexandra Deuwel, who was due to stay with Mr McLachlan’s cousin in South Australia’s Barossa Valley.
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The emails set out how Mr McLachlan and the AFL’s head of government relations, former Liberal staffer Jude Donnelly, appealed to Mr Dutton to overrule the Australian Border Force’s Head of Strategic Border Command and allow Ms Deuwel to enter Australia.
Mr Dutton on Wednesday repeated that he overruled decisions by department officers in “hundreds of cases” yearly.
>> TAP HERE TO READ THE EMAILS
Emails reveal Ms Deuwel admitted to Border Force officers at Adelaide airport in October 2015 that she planned to work for Callum and Skye MacLachlan — including helping with their four children and cooking — in return for free accommodation.
They also reveal the existence of text messages, found in Ms Deuwel’s phone and yet to be made public, which make it clear she was planning to work.
Callum’s father, Hugh MacLachlan, has donated about $150,000 to the Liberal Party since 1999, including $50,000 six months after Mr Dutton allowed Ms Deuwel in.
Labor senator Kimberley Kitching said the documents showed the intervention of Mr Dutton, immigration minister at the time, “was anything but routine or above board”.
Mr Dutton came under even more pressure on Thursday night when it was revealed he intervened in another case, five months earlier, to save an Italian au pair from deportation.
She came to Australia to work for a former police colleague of his. Mr Dutton was once a Queensland police officer.
In the case of Ms Deuwel, the emails show Mr Dutton was warned by his department that the then 27-year-old French national had been previously counselled by airport officials over fears she had worked on a visitor’s visa. The minister was told the Commonwealth could be exposed to a “financial liability” if he intervened in the case.
The lobbying began the morning after Ms Deuwel was arrested, when AFL boss Gillon McLachlan received an email from Callum and Skye MacLachlan, which he then passed to Ms Donnelly, who handles the AFL’s relations with the federal government.
“There has clearly been a misunderstanding that she was intending to work for us when she is here to spend time with our family, as we consider her to be family,” Callum claimed to Gillon.
Ms Donnelly then sent two emails to Mr Dutton’s chief of staff with one including Ms Deuwel’s passport details.
The intervention from the AFL’s senior executives on November 1, 2015, sparked a flurry of emails over the following 11 hours between Mr Dutton’s office and ABF.
“SBC (Strategic Border Command) will be providing detail which does not support the Minister intervening,” read one email from SBC chief Clive Murray.
But at 8.20 that night, Mr Dutton granted a new visa moments before he jetted off on a trip to the Middle East, signing the direction as the “aircraft doors were closed”.
Senator Kitching said Prime Minister Scott Morrison needed to force Mr Dutton to “front the Australian people and fully explain his actions”.
“This whole affair is as dodgy as it gets,” she said. “If Scott Morrison walks past this standard, he is making it clear what kind of ethics he will accept in his administration.”
>> TAP HERE TO READ THE EMAILS
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