Catchup Post!

It’s been awhile since my last post! Last weekend was the usual dinners and drinks – I’m really enjoying our Friday night drinks at Old Parliament House – it’s such a great hangout spot, day or night, for drinks, dinner, breakfast or lunch… During the day it’s very pretty too and I’m determined that we must have breakfast there sometime!

Fun-run

On Sunday morning I dragged myself out at 8.30 am for a fun-run with some other Treasury grads. Most of us only did the 4km option, and surprisingly it wasn’t very hard at all – the gym membership must be paying off! There was a big age range – from kids around 12 to people over 50 – I was really impressed!






Team Treasury








Budget LOCKUP

On Tuesday night, as you probably heard, the Federal Budget was released so our whole grad group got to help supervise the Budget Lockup. Basically the press, opposition parties etc get to go to Parliament on the day the Budget is to be released and read the Budget statements and so forth before they are actually made public.

For 7 hours they’re locked up in Parliament under extremely tight security and are allowed to read through all the Budget documents and prepare their analysis/feature article/reply speech, as the case may be. I was allocated to the Fairfax room which housed the Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, Illawarra Mercury and Newcastle Herald. It was great to see the journos at work (especially the hardcore reporters at the Fin Review). The Treasurer came to each room and answered questions from the journalists, and seemed to know them quite well.

We got to go to the Treasurer’s press conference where he went through the Budget highlights and then fielded questions from the media. There were the usual jibes about whether this was his last budget, but I think it’s all getting pretty old by now.

Budget BINGE

After it’s all over, everyone heads off to the Budget Binge, where there’s apparently a keg of free beer (which apparently only lasted for 15 minutes) and food… but it’s really a chance for everyone who worked on the Budget to relax and reward themselves after some hard weeks/months at the office. For me and quite a few of the grads, it was just an excuse to go out after the Lockup, and just be part of the whole Budget environment that involves Treasury and Finance at this time of year. A lot of people in Budget group had been working until past midnight so they really deserved a good break.






Note Tai's headwear...








Budget QUESTION TIME

The next day we were back at Parliament for Budget Question Time – but it wasn’t really Budget Question Time because, as pointed out by Downer, it was the first time in 11 years that the Opposition ran out of questions on the Budget after just 6 or 7 questions. I don’t know whether this says more about the strength of this year’s budget or the weakness of the opposition party…

Anyway, it was awesome to be there seeing the Ministers we work for in the flesh and watching their antics. There are some true comedians, great debaters, skilled strategists and plain rowdy characters in the House of Reps, and it was great to be there to watch the show.

The weekend gone by…

This Friday we went to see Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet at the Canberra Theatre. Saturday we went to see the Constable Exhibition at the National Gallery, and at night we went out for dinner and drinks/dancing. Sorry no photos this time!