As a politics nerd, I was so very excited to be included in the media lock-up for the 2011-2012 Federal Budget. It’s pretty much like Christmas.
The lock-up begins at 1:30pm, but you can line up from about midday, so this morning I timed my arrival for around 12:30. After I made my way up to Parliament, past the great hall at to the back past the entrances to the House of Representatives and the Senate I was greeted by a number of very official-looking Treasury officials who checked to make sure I was who I said I was.
There was no catering this year, they said, so I better have my own food. The budget cuts had started already and I wasn’t even in the lockup room yet!
Media get the documents a full six hours before Wayne Swan can announce all his “announceables” in Parliament that night, so naturally we’re not allowed to have communication with the outside world. My iPhone was quickly confiscated but thankfully after a short debate they let me keep my laptop once I assured them that it wasn’t going to be able to get a message out of the lockup rooms.
At about 1:20 the room began to crowd with journalists from all over and at 1:30 the doors flood open and everyone pushes in like its the boxing day sales at Myer. We’re each presented with a showbag of budget goodies, four budget papers, a number of glossy announcements and the Treasurers speech.
We’re then shuffled off to our individual rooms, which I recognised as the committee rooms I’d come to know and love from the various senate estimates and budget estimates hearings I’d streamed from the APH website for the past year.
The big publications like AAP, Fairfax and News Limited have rooms with massive desktops set up. Radio and TV crews set up all their equipment in the halls while the journos begin digesting the budget documents.
The room I was assigned turned out to be rather quiet with only about 10 other journos, worn out tables and what I can only describe as white plastic garden chairs for the journalists to sit on.
Outside in the hallway, desks are lined with department press releases related to the budget, while upstairs Treasury has laid out the budget statements for each portfolio. I gather these documents up as I move along  and what originally looked like a daunting amount of reading now just looked impossible.
Just as I was despairing over the sheer volume of reading I would have to do, another Treasury official popped up and offered the four budget papers in PDF form on a secure USB. Saviour! All the documents could now be easily flicked through and verified while I was writing.
I first went through all the press releases, as I figured they would give me the most obvious indicators of what the government wants to show off in the budget, before I figured out what they weren’t so proud of. I wasn’t feeling a lot of love for the IT. Press releases directed at each state and territory about the NBN contained no new information, and very little content was different except for the name of that particular state or territory.
After making my way through the budget papers, I found my stories (over at ZDNet.com.au) and wrote them up over the course of the next few hours.
The room was eerily quiet except for the sounds of journalists tapping away. Every so often an ABC radio journalist could be heard practicing their news bulletin from the corridor outside, or someone would pop in to ask someone about this that or the other funding initiative.
At around 4pm, Wayne Swan held a press conference for the captive journalists upstairs. I have to admit I missed this because I was busy writing. When it came time for a break, I decided to wander around and stretch my legs a bit.
All the TV talent were getting prepared for their live crosses after 7:30. A make up chair was set up in one corner with a girl attending to a patient Leigh Sales. Glenn Milne (who I was seated next to incidentally) and Laurie Oakes share a handshake in the hall, while David Koch films a segment inside the lock-up no doubt for some Sunrise segment the next day.
Finally as the clock nears the 7:30 mark, the bells sound for MPs to assemble in the House of Representatives for the Treasurer to deliver his Budget speech. Exhausted journalists file out from their rooms to the entrance to wait for Wayne Swan to stand so they can finally be free. TV journalists are all prettied up for their TV appearances and online journalists, like me, have their laptops in hand ready to file as soon as the doors open.
As Swan stands up to deliver his fourth budget speech we all file out, Â I find my iPhone and race outside into the freezing Canberra autumn night to file my stories from the steps of Parliament.
Lock-up is like nothing else I have ever experienced before. Â As a new journalist being amongst the likes of the veterans of the Canberra Press Gallery, there’s just no comparison.
I wonder how long the phenomenon of the lock-up will last, however. Much of the funding in the budget had already been announced by the government in the last two weeks. And the block on telecommunications seems relatively archaic.  In a time where we’re used to tweeting every piece of new information we’re given, when the death of Osama Bin Laden is announced on Twitter before the US President can take to the podium, to be given massive amounts of information about millions of dollars in government spending and cuts and not being able to tell anyone about it for six hours is probably the cruelest thing you can ever do to a journalist.
