Steph Chalmers

And I'm ABC Business Reporter Steph Chalmers.

Yeah, I do have a bit of FOMO having been to Canberra in the past, but since COVID they kind of discovered you can have a remote lock-up.

So now we're actually locked up in the ABC at Ultimo in Sydney, which is kind of less exciting, but it is still –

that kind of unique experience of not having your phone, kind of being locked in with all your colleagues.

We also had some economists from outside come in and, you know, act as our experts, kind of talk us through what they were seeing.

There's a lot of snacks floating around.

There's officials from Treasury in there.

So we don't

have the police coming in and out, but we do have a phone line to Canberra where we can put questions to treasury and that sort of thing.

So not as exciting, I'd say, but still definitely not an ordinary day, a bit of a long slog in there, but kind of nice to be offline as well.

Yeah, I think as with many budgets we've seen in recent years, budget leaks are very expected.

This one was pretty widely leaked, you'd have to say.

There wasn't anything that was a total surprise.

Obviously, the details around how the grandfathering

worked with things like the negative gearing and CGT discount changes weren't known before the budget, but there was a sense that there would be some sort of grandfathered arrangement in there.

So it didn't have that feeling of,

a super surprising budget, but still compared to previous years, recent years, it did feel quite significant and that it actually was taking substantial steps to change things.

And as you say, really a lot of the focus has been on the housing impact of those tax changes and how it goes to addressing intergenerational inequality.

And that was obviously the remit of a lot of reporters in the lockup.

I was sort of tasked with looking at