Each year I ponder whether my attendance at the budget lock-up will be my last. Can I really take another several hours being incarcerated in a dusty room poring through politically concocted nonsense – also known as the Budget Papers?

But then I see those eager young faces – fewer each year because legacy media is under siege – who regard the event as akin to going to the Royal Show. They duly list the contents of the show bag, which is just what the government wants them to do.

I think I’m a bit like those people who go to the gym each day even though they hate it. At least my attendance at the lock-up only takes up a few hours.

This year I was in the pole position to exit the lock-up room at 7.30 p.m. on the dot when the Treasurer – Jimbo, in this case – rose in the House to deliver the Budget Speech.  Hilariously, the wet-behind-the-ears Treasury official asked me if I would prefer to stay and watch the parliamentary proceedings because the television in the room had been switched on. Was she out of her mind?  I would rather eat raw tripe.

I always take a book and a calculator into the lockup. The book is to while away the time between filing and the time we are released into the night. I’ve become so good at parsing the Budget Papers that I manage to get through quite a lot of my book.

While I’m very adept at mental arithmetic, which probably reflects my age and the quality of my education, I always fish out an old calculator from my desk at home so I can check the numbers I quote.

Each year, I’m tempted to smuggle in a hip flask – vodka, gin, I’m not fussy – but I always think twice. I’m told that some of the legendary journalists in days gone by did so. I’m not naming names apart from Paddy.

Over the years, the quality of the catering in the lockup has markedly deteriorated.  Save for the absence of fairy bread, it now basically resembles a children’s party. Lollies and party pies feature prominently. I’m beginning to wonder whether some insider is related to a dentist who provides those filling-destroying sweets for free.

It has become increasingly difficult to understand the point of the lock-up after the arrangement was decentralised and is now organised by the media outlets themselves.  That’s unless you are a puffed up, left-leaning ‘influencer’ and then the Labor party will fly you to Canberra and arrange a special lock-up for you.

In the pre-Covid era – that has a certain ring to it – we would all make our way to Canberra and congregate in the bowels of Parliament House. There was always a certain energy, frisson even, to the event. I was wont to wander into the rooms of our competitors where I had a few buddies typing away. I just loved the stunned – nay querulous – looks I would receive from most of the journalists.

The highlight of the day was the visit of the treasurer, accompanied by the secretary of the department and various other hangers-on. The finance minister would also stroll through at some stage. The journalists would cluster around the politicians and compete to ask questions, even if most of them were completely inane – both the questions and the politicians.

I do remember when Scott Morrison was treasurer, and he had introduced the levy on the big banks (and the Macquarie Group).  His explanation for this decision had nothing to do with economics, but his view that no one likes the banks, so there. ‘Cry me a river’ was his punchline, although thankfully he didn’t break into song.

This year’s lock-up was possibly the worst on record because the government had pre-announced virtually every measure contained in the budget. Sure, there was the surprise of the two reductions in the lowest income tax rate, the first of which doesn’t take effect for 15 months. Jimbo had to concede that the gains in people’s net income would be ‘modest’. That’s one word for it: trivial, imperceptible, unremarkable are other words.

And if you do the maths – oldies like me are inclined this way – it turns out that this income tax cut is only 20 per cent of the additional income tax revenue that the government will receive by dint of bracket creep. In other words, we are all paying for the tax cut – and more.

The budget was also more unbearable than usual because of the outright lies and mistruths that Jimbo was spouting. He used the trick of taking the 2022 Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook (PEFO) as some sort of baseline and told everyone – or tried to tell everyone – that the Labor government had managed to achieve some miracle outcomes including reducing government debt.

Take this howler. ‘Gross debt will hit $940 billion this financial year, $177 billion less than what we inherited.’ This is just tosh.  If we look at the table on gross debt, it clearly shows that the figure for 2022-23, the year in which Jimbo became the top money man, was $890 billion. In other words, gross debt has risen by $50 billion.

On what planet does that count as a reduction of $177 billion? On Planet Jimbo is the answer, because he is taking the irrelevant PEFO and comparing government debt with what was predicted at the time – before the Ukraine inflation and the ramp up in inflation.

And here’s another thing you should know. After all those months of teasing the then Coalition treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, about accumulating a trillion dollars in debt – he never came close – Jimbo will see that figure reached next financial year. It is forecast to come in at $1.022 trillion. But Jimbo won’t be worrying too much about the facts. Expect the line about Labor having reduced government debt to be trotted out throughout the election campaign.

Take another example. According to Jimbo, ‘Real payments growth is forecast to average 1.7 per cent to 2028-29, less than half of the average under our predecessors. We have found around $94 billion of savings since coming to government, including another $2 billion in this budget.’

Give me a break. The very idea that growth in spending will be kept to 1.7 per cent on average is a complete fantasy. This financial year, government spending will rise by a whopping 6 per cent. Next financial year, the figure is 3 per cent. It is completely implausible that any government would put its foot on the brake to achieve an average annual increase in spending of just 1.7 per cent.

And I nearly choked on my lolly when I read the savings of $2 billion. Is he for real?  Government spending this year will be $732 billion, so $2 billion is not even a rounding error. He must be pulling our legs if he thinks that we should congratulate him for ‘saving’ the equivalent of two and six.

I came close to throwing myself out the window when I read Jimbo’s claim that ‘climate change is causing more frequent and extreme weather events’, even though the evidence shows no such thing. Maybe this really will have to be my last lock-up. There is only so much an old gal can take.