Budget day. It has its time-honoured rituals which outlive governments of all persuasions. There’s the pre-budget leaks both intentional and accidental. The Treasurer’s pre-budget photo opportunity with his family, the slightly medieval budget lock-up in which members of the media, lobby groups and the opposition are locked in separate rooms and given the budget papers several hours ahead of the budget’s delivery, on pain of death if they attempt to leave the room or, these days, attempt to tweet market-sensitive information from the bowels of Parliament House.

While we do our budget rituals well, Britain, of course, is in a league of its own. There they have the Chancellor’s appearance with Gladstone’s box, which has only recently been retired after 150 years of service due to fragility. In another tradition, the budget speech is the only occasion in which a member of parliament is entitled to drink alcohol in the House of Commons Chamber. Nigel Lawson, a personality well known to readers of The Spectator, used to sip on white wine spritzers while waxing lyrical about monetarism in the 1980s. Attlee’s Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, used to scoff rum and milk, which he poured from a silver coffee pot, while delivering Labour’s postwar budgets. Roy Jenkins (of whom an excellent new biography by John Campbell has just been published) didn’t generally exercise his right to drink while delivering the budget speech, but would always ensure he’d had plenty of claret in his office beforehand, and would down several scotches before facing the TV cameras afterwards. Tony Abbott has shown an alacrity in returning imperial traditions to modern Australia. Maybe this one is next.

A good thing about being Treasurer is that you are one of the very few people who can enter the budget lock-up and then promptly walk out again. The shadow Treasurer receives no such privileges. I miss question time to enter the lock-up at 2pm and start going through the budget tables in detail. I go in with my friend and colleague Jenny Macklin, who has a razor-sharp policy mind and a deep-seated passionate approach to public policy. She is soft and tough all at the same time: caring deeply about the plight of the less fortunate, but willing to communicate hardline messages when necessary, and she was the perfect person to implement the Northern Territory intervention with compassion but determination. The silence of the budget lock-up is soon interrupted when she can’t help but voice indignation at the budget’s punitive treatment of aged pensioners, grumbling her outrage as we move through the budget, measure by measure.

The budget papers give the lie to the yawning gap between the government’s pre-election rhetoric and the post-election reality. We were promised no new taxes. In fact, the tax-to-GDP ratio is forecast to be higher every single year of the forward estimates, and at its lowest point will be higher than it ever was under the Rudd or Gillard governments. In fact, the Abbott government will have the eighth highest tax-to-GDP ratio in Australian history. The only seven occasions in which the nation has had a higher tax to GDP ratio were under the Howard government.

The National Press Club is a fine national institution. On average, I have addressed it twice a year for the last few years. Its boardroom, in which they entertain speakers and selected guests before each performance, has one of the finest collections of historical political photos I have seen in Australia. There are candid images of every prime minister since Menzies holding forth at the club. There’s even a reminder that the Shah of Iran once gave the Australian people the benefit of his views in a Press Club speech, as well as rarely seen photos of some of the great Australian political funerals.

In accordance with tradition, the shadow Treasurer addresses the club on the week after the budget. I type out the speech on my laptop as I traverse the country post-budget. I peck away at the keyboard juggling the computer on an unsteady Qantas tray. The government wants us to pass all their measures, but we find several of them too unconscionable to contemplate. Yet the sum total of all the measures we will oppose will have less of an impact on the budget than the cost of the government’s extraordinary paid parental leave scheme. There could be bipartisan consensus reasonably quickly on a significant measure to save tax payers: drop the biggest expansion of middle-class welfare we have ever seen by ditching the over-the-top PPL, and save tax payers more than $5 billion a year.

The National Press Club nearly doesn’t happen. My flight tries to land in Canberra three times but can’t penetrate a fog as thick as pea soup. We return to Sydney as the plane has limited fuel. Another flight to Canberra and finally success, although I am now ten minutes late for a nationally televised address. My long held view that it is a silly idea for Canberra to be Sydney’s second airport is strongly confirmed.

Enough of budgets. Now for television. The second season of the masterful political thriller House of Cards has reached its conclusion. I’m sure the scriptwriters have more install for us though, as our modern Macbeth has reached the zenith of power. The award for the best political drama of the last few years however, goes to the Danish series Borgen. The just completed third and final season is just as brilliant as its predecessors. What business does this nation of just six million have making such compelling television? Whatever the reason for Denmark producing such brilliant television, political aficionados should not miss it.