Budget day is always an exercise in government manipulation. For most Australians, it is a performance art to which they pay virtually no attention.
Instead, most people understandably just want to know what the Budget means for them: where the money is spent, whether there are tax cuts to help with cost of living pressures, what new programs can help their families .
At the moment, most of the parliamentary media are holed up in the Press Gallery wing of Parliament House. Yes, literally locked in! The doors are closed, there are guards posted on the stairs preventing the “detainees” from leaving or anyone else from entering.
Except the Treasurer and other select ministers and political officials, that is, who are tasked with explaining why this year’s Budget is a document of pure genius.
Journalists trapped in this restricted area get early access to Budget documents. These include the word-for-word speech that Treasurer Jim Chalmers will deliver tonight, and it’s a great way to find out if he stumbled or changed what he was supposed to say at the last minute.
The press gallery closes as Treasurer Jim Chalmers (pictured) and his team explain why the budget is a good one.
The ‘detainees’ are only released when Chalmers takes the podium of the House of Representatives to begin to explain (implicitly, of course) why he is the best Treasurer who has ever walked the corridors of power. It’s what every Treasurer does.
It is Chalmers’ third budget. The team of apparatchiks around you will have spent most of the day going door to door in the press gallery explaining what is worth reporting in the Budget and what doesn’t matter much (according to them).
Journalists in confinement do not have access to outside experts, the opposition or any form of communication they would otherwise rely on when writing and producing news. They take their cell phone when they arrive, in the same way that you cannot bring an umbrella to the theater, although I am not a big theater fan.
To get early access to Budget documents, journalists must hand over their mobile phones and disconnect the internet before being locked up for six hours.
Jim Chalmers (pictured) will take advantage of today’s budget deadlock to get his messages into journalists’ ears before the opposition and others can
The Internet is offline (how do younger journalists cope?), Parliament and Treasury officials are tasked with monitoring the offices of each media outlet, double- and triple-checking that no one has smuggled a second cell phone into the building, for example, or secretly activated their Internet when they shouldn’t have.
Anyone who attends signs their life promising not to do such things under threat of criminal conviction and even jail time if they break the rules.
The Treasurer gives a tour so journalists can get their quotes and ask questions they hope will provoke thought. There is also a press conference, which completes the stories being written from inside the temporary prison.
This year, a journalist who was due to give birth soon asked in advance what would happen if she went into labor during lockdown. Last I heard there was no guarantee they would let them out (I’m not even kidding). Understandably, she was thinking about letting this year’s lockdown pass.
More experienced attendees develop a learned cynicism about the entire process. The most budgets a journalist has covered over the years, this is number 16, but some have covered more than 40! – the better equipped they are to ignore the draft and read the document themselves, looking for what the Treasurer and his entourage hope you don’t see: money allocated for a future electoral war fund, unrealistic inflation figures that make selling the easier Budget rationales, cuts or spending explosions on programs that are not considered vote-winners.
The pantomime is more or less the same every year. Unsurprisingly, given Budget Day is a one-sided affair, early coverage tends to err on the positive side, just the way the government likes it.
However, as the days and weeks pass, the situation evens out, as outside voices weigh in and the hundreds of pages presented to journalists receive a proper review.
In the modern era there are more and more authoritative leaks designed to fill the week or two before the Budget with good news for the government. But there are always one or two surprises that night.
Chalmers (pictured) will deliver his third budget and second surplus at 7.30pm (AEST)
Unusually, this year the leaks included being told the exact size of the surplus, which was revealed to be $9.3 billion this financial year. But there is no mention of what the next financial year will become, perhaps because it is a deficit of bad news or a surplus of good news that the Treasurer wants to triumphantly announce tonight.
Almost no journalists listen to the Treasurer’s budget speech later that night once they get out of jail, simply because they already read it over and over while they were locked up.
They are then too busy seeking out comments from the opposition and others before their deadlines, fact-checking once the internet is up, or simply drinking in one of Canberra’s bars near Parliament.
The Treasurer does the media rounds that night before attending a massive fundraising dinner in Parliament, raising lots of cash to keep his political party campaigning in the upcoming election. This activity also dominates the following weeks, but not until the major media sweeps across morning television and radio the next day.
Fewer Australians now watch the Treasurer’s live speech and subsequent television interviews than before. But millions still do, most attentive to how they and their families will be affected by the decisions made.
We’ll do it here on Daily Mail Australia too from 7:30pm (AEST), as we put aside the spin and look for what really matters to you.