Australia has no access to men in Papua New Guinea immigration prison, senators told

Six men held inside a Papua New Guinean immigration prison have been released and will be sent home, and Australia has no visibility, access or influence over the fate of the 47 remaining inside, Senate estimates has been told.

The head of the home affairs department, Michael Pezzullo, also rejected suggestions there is a new border crisis involving people arriving by plane and claiming asylum, with many being exploited by organised crime and illegitimate labour hire companies.

At Senate estimates on Monday the head of Australia’s offshore processing regime, Major General Craig Furini, revealed that six men had been released from the Bomana immigration detention centre in Port Moresby.

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“It’s my understanding they were released on the basis they’d accepted a voluntary returns package,” Furini said.

He said he had no knowledge of the conditions inside the centre where 47 men remained, what access the men had to communications, and said there were no Australian officers there.

“We have no visibility of what goes on inside.”

Furini told estimates he didn’t know if any of them were among the 10 detainees who had already been approved for medevac transfer to Australia when they were arrested more than two months ago and detained without means of outside contact.

Pezzullo noted PNG’s actions had interrupted planned medical care.

“It is the one point of intersection whereby the operation of Australian law touches activities undertaken in accordance with PNG law,” Pezzullo said.

“If medevac requests come in under the relevant subsection of 198, but the person is held in detention or otherwise not able to be released for transfer … this is an issue we need to work through diplomatically.”

He added this was an issue for Nauru as well, which has notoriously refused Australian medical transfer requests. Guardian Australia understands the Nauruan government continues to block medevac transfers.

The committee heard that as of Monday morning 341 medevac applications had been made, and 135 transferred. The number included 14 reapplications after they failed for apparent paperwork problems. Over the course of the bill being in place 13 people have been hospitalised in Australia, nine for less than seven days. Pezzullo said there was no mechanism to return people who had finished treatment or were assessed as not requiring any.

Earlier, Pezzullo addressed recent reports and comments by the shadow home affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, about more than 95,000 people who arrived by plane seeking asylum in the past five years, and said they did not reflect the department’s experience.

Keneally has used the figures to say the Coalition has lost control of its borders.

On Monday Pezzullo said he had seen a border crisis before, citing the tens of thousands of boat arrivals and related deaths at sea, and “this is not a border crisis, I can assure you”.

Related: Australia on track for record number of asylum seekers arriving by plane, Labor says

Keneally tabled a report by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, which said while Australia met minimum standards of addressing human trafficking, it was not successful in many areas.

She suggested an earlier comment by Pezzullo – that the US administration wanted what Australia had – was wrong.

Pezzullo rejected the suggestion, and said he was with the US state department “just two weeks ago” and they had that “exact discussion”.

He said Australia’s points-based process, which underpinned a managed immigration, and the universal visa system is “explicitly” what the US administration wants to achieve.

“In terms of targeting human traffickers, the evidence we see in the field … does not bear out anything other than this assessment. And in the case where it has occurred it’s despicable, it’s abhorrent.”

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More than 84% of the 95,000 asylum applicants who arrived by air were found not to have a valid claim, which Keneally has previously said was an indicator of labour exploitation risks.

On Thursday Keneally read the opening paragraph of the Coalition MP Jason Wood’s introduction to a Senate investigation, which found in February that organised crime and illegitimate labour hire companies were taking advantage of “loopholes” in immigration laws to exploit workers who were in Australia waiting for their claims to be processed – mostly Malaysians on electronic travel authorities.

“Organised crime and illegitimate labour hire companies are using this loophole to bring out illegal workers who are often vulnerable and open to exploitation. This represents an orchestrated scam that enables these criminal elements to exploit foreign workers in Australia until their claims are finalised.”

Pezzullo downplayed the findings.

“We do see opportunistic attempts to … claim asylum after border arrival … [but] we do not see the scale of organised trafficking that leads to slavery, slavery-like conditions and labour exploitation, on the scale that is present in the media commentary,” he told estimates.

“Do we see opportunistic attempts to depress wages and hold people in apprehension about their visa occasions? Yes, on occasion.

“Do we see the global human trafficking that sees Australia as a light touch that can easily penetrate all the border defences I described earlier? No we don’t.”