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The Australian Federal Police are up before Senate estimates this morning, where they’re being grilled on revelations in the Guardian this morning that an “administrative error” caused massive delays in their investigation of war crimes allegations against a retired Sri Lankan general, Jagath Jayasuriya.

Human rights groups warned the AFP in 2019 that Jayasuriya was in Australia and urged them to investigate detailed and extensive allegations against him.

But an “administrative error” delayed the AFP from assigning the matter to an investigative team for almost two years. During that time, the Senate heard, Jayasuriya travelled in and out of Australia.

Deputy commissioner Ian McCartney tells senator Nick McKim that the AFP is “not going to shy away from” the error. He says the AFP member who had carriage of the matter had gone on “long term personal leave” and that the complaint was not properly recorded in AFP systems. But McCartney says, even without the error, the AFP would have decided not to investigate. He says:

It’s an issue that we’re not going to shy away from. There was an administrative oversight in terms of how that matter was handled that terms the delay in terms of the assessment and the response to the complainant.

I think it’s important to note and it’s important to be clear that whilst there was a delay and whilst there was an administrative oversight, this wouldn’t have changed the decision that in our view the Sri Lankan domestic inquiry into war crimes is the most appropriate body to assess this sort of allegation. And I think we’ve explained at length the practices that we put in place, this goes back to 2019 … of the establishment of a sensitive investigations oversight board to ensure we are appropriately addressing these sorts of matters, senator.

The United Nations has previously warned that Sri Lanka’s inquiries into war crimes allegations are helping provide “systemic impunity” to war crimes suspects.

Jayasuriya is accused in multiple lawsuits of overseeing war crimes against separatist Tamils in the last stages of the country’s bloody civil war in 2009 – allegations which the Sri Lankan military rejects.

Speaking after the lawsuits, brigadier Roshan Seneviratne, a military spokesperson, said the accusations against Jayasuriya were false:

We maintain that these allegations are false. The LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] was defeated by the military, their ideology is still alive and that is what we see in these allegations.

Estimates in both senses of the word. At Senate estimates, Liberal senator Gerard Rennick is asking AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw about crowd estimates for anti-vaccine mandate protests in Canberra.

Rennick: “It was chockers.”

Rennick is getting down to people and square metre calculations.

Kershaw: “I”m going to stick to my figure – I’m not changing that.”

Rennick goes to historical crowd size calculations, asking: “Are you saying the Sydney Morning Herald was wrong back in 1985 as well?”

Moving right along …

Coalition backbencher George Christensen is giving his valedictory speech in parliament today, as he leaves politics ahead of the election.

His address touched on a grab-bag of his pet issues, including criticising Covid mandates, calling for a crackdown on banking institutions, and complaining “corporate Australia has gone woke”.

“Taxation is theft,” he added.

Christensen spoke about his family, saying he was prevented from being present at the birth of his daughter in 2020 due to Covid border restrictions. He spoke emotionally about serious complications his wife experienced during the birth, including having to undergo emergency surgery, and thanked foreign minister Marise Payne for her help in obtaining information about his wife’s condition overseas.

The outgoing member for Dawson also belted parliament itself, saying he doesn’t like coming to Canberra and claiming question time was “a farce”. He said:

Backbenchers ask pointless questions written by someone else, the opposition asks pointless gotcha questions that never get answers.

Christensen said the “public hate the vitriol” of politics, and claimed parliament is at risk of turning into “a sheltered workshop for people who can’t think for themselves”

In Senate estimates, Labor has started its questioning with the mysterious $3bn reduction in “decisions taken but not yet announced”– which it is calling a “secret cut”.

The finance minister, Simon Birmingham, said:

Essentially the government reversed out the decision taken but not announced and provided the additional funding in the package itself, which you’ll find elsewhere in the budget … There are no cuts, as you put it.

There is simply publication of final decisions. They’re not cuts. The budget line for decisions taken but not yet announced comes down, because the decisions have been announced. It shows negative because elsewhere in the budget there are positives against a specific program item.

But as we explained yesterday, the fact the line item is negative does tend to suggest that the government made a greater provision in the mid-year economic and fiscal update for the programs than it ended up giving.

Labor’s Tim Ayres put this to Birmingham – is it spending that is not proceeding?

He replied:

It’s a shift from the aggregate of the contingency reserve to specific program spending … Even if I took that alternate scenario, an internal decision for something never announced and never provided is hardly a cut.