It’s the Canberra whodunnit that has Peter Dutton tongue-tied – who deleted those 13 words?

Neither shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash nor the only other witness can answer a questions raising some tricky issues for the Opposition Leader.

It began with a simple question from Senator Linda White on Wednesday morning: “How many times had Senator Cash met with a notorious fathers’ rights group, the Men’s Rights Agency, before she voted against a family law reform package aimed at reducing conflict between separated parents?”

Former women’s minister Senator Cash was not in a position to answer.

MRA, and its founder Sue Price, had initially advertised a May 6 meeting between the pair. MRA’s website said it “had been facilitated by the leader of the Liberal Party, Peter Dutton”.

A few days later, those words had disappeared.

It’s not known how they vanished from the website.

Mr Dutton could not shed any light either and did not answer any questions about his links to men’s rights campaigners on the political right, which appear to have been reactivated as the Coalition voted against family law reform aimed at reducing domestic conflicts.

The Queensland-based MRA was linked in the 90s to a case family violence involving a single father reported to have been her client but whom she says she had only referred to a lawyer, not counselled.

Admittedly controversial

But she admits her group, whose website argues against domestic violence orders, might cause Mr Dutton to get into political trouble.

She denies, though, ever invading victims’ privacy through surveillance or leaks or that she once tried to snoop on a Queensland cabinet minister.

“It’s all a bunch of lies, as far as I’m concerned,” Ms Price told The New Daily on Wednesday night.

Ms Price said she could not recall how those words came to be taken down from her website shortly before the budget.

Nor could she recall how the meeting with Senator Cash had even occurred.

“I’d sent an email to [Mr Dutton] saying: ‘Why don’t you put the fathers back in families?’

“The only thing he did was forward the email to Senator Cash,” Ms Price said.

A staffer denied that anyone in Mr Dutton’s or Ms Cash’s office asked for the website to be edited.

But she declined to say if that would mean Mr Dutton had arranged for a meeting with Senator Cash after getting an email from someone he did not know

“I don’t know how it happened. I can’t recall if it came from Peter Dutton or Senator Cash.”

Ms Price wrote approvingly about his contributions to a parliamentary committee in his first term in parliament.

Mr Dutton’s office did not respond to questions.

“I removed the reference myself,” Ms Price said later.

She could not say when or if someone had asked.

A charged issue

A spokesman for Senator Cash said the issue was a desperate Labor Party smear that was also hypocritical.

The spokesman said Labor senators had previously cited the MRA as a reference in a report tabled in Parliament three years ago.

Family law has long been a political issue; Pauline Hanson was charged in the last Parliament’s committees, which were a magnet for the far right.

Reforms by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus aim to reduce domestic violence and make family law less confrontational and less apt to be used by one parent to harass or aggravate another.

Ms Price claimed in her wrap of their meeting, an unverified, subjective account, that this might present a chance to join with the cross bench and sink the bill but this was not likely, one upper house source said.

Mr Dutton has been associated with the fathers’ rights movement since he first came on the national political scene in 2004.

In 2013 while health minister, Mr Dutton spoke at a Parliament House function organised by Christian men’s rights activist Warwick Marsh, an event advertised as a chance to get a break from tip-toeing around “feminist minefields”.