(Image: Private Media)

There’s an awful lack of colour at this budget lockup. Instead, everything’s power suit black or blue, the default uniform up on the Hill, broken up by specs of tan and the odd smattering of Gorman.

This year, of course, what little colour might normally exist at the most overhyped night in Australian politics is even more drained. Instead of gathering together in the main committee room, journalists are atomised in offices around the gallery. Some, like my Crikey colleagues, are locked-up remotely in Sydney.

That subdued vibe pervades the whole affair. The flame-red budget tree in the Senate courtyard, normally flourishing this time of year, has shed its leaves. Many of the restaurants scattered around Canberra’s inner south, usually open late for the boozy, schmoozy afterparty aren’t even extending their trading hours. Nobody even seems to be sneaking durries in the loos.

The treasurer doesn’t get take his traditional victory lap around the committee room. Instead, he’s meant to wind his way around the serpentine gallery corridors, but it doesn’t seem he gets much further than the News Corp office.

When he speaks to journalists, who are escorted on a winding route downstairs to watch his presser, he is sombre, almost apologetic about Australia’s pandemic good fortune, mumbling into his hands. At the press conference, numbers are capped, and journalists are absurdly forced to sit with a 1.5 metre gap between us. Meanwhile, nightclubs are open nearly all over the country.

Frydenberg only just cracks a smile when he answers his first question, from a reporter at The West Australian who asks him whether he should be thanking iron ore prices for our good luck.

“We’re giving a very big thank you to Western Australia and to iron ore,” Frydenberg agrees.

Perhaps the triumph is waiting for the big speech tonight. Perhaps the treasurer knows to not get hubristic when, despite the surprisingly robust economy, the Coalition can’t quite seem to surge ahead of a wedged and confused Labor in the polls.

Perhaps he knows the budget, or at least budget night, doesn’t matter nearly as much to the punters as it does those locked up. So much about this generous budget was known in advance — dropped to the media, part of the broader narrative which calcified over the last week.

Which leaves tonight, and the lockup which precedes it as a silly bit of pageantry. Even in a year like this, when the traditional order of things is disrupted, the outline of that pageantry remains. You can see it in the eagerness with which the hordes of reporters, staffers, consultants and associated grifters descend on Parliament this week.

You can see it in the mutual breathless excitement as politicians chum in the corridors. Liberal backbencher Tim Wilson, leading an entourage of men in ill-fitting suits, tells Insiders host David Speers he’s “loving this new ABC obsession with debt”. Matt Canavan lingers forever in the doorway of the Sky News offices.

If those last two sentences made any sense to you at all, you probably (a) care about the budget, and (b) are irrelevant to the government’s broader play here because you already know exactly how you’re going to vote.

You’re also (c) a minority. The voters of Australia are, if 2019 is anything to go by, largely politically-disengaged normies. They won’t be looking back to tonight when they vote. For many it’ll barely register.

Today is primarily one for the hacks, and the shrinking cohort of people who watch Insiders for fun. And because the ritual, mystery and tradition of it all excites that narrow cohort, the big wasteful circus continues year after year.

But the pagaent fades in a COVID world. This year is turgid and colourless. Dozens of journalists aren’t even in Canberra. Suddenly, so much of the ritual looks old and silly.

Perhaps soon, it’ll fade away for good, and I won’t have to spend six hours without my phone.