A reporter's guide to the Budget lockup

Practicalities

The lockup officially begins at 10.30am but doors open at 10am. Seating is largely unassigned. I've not met anybody who wants to arrive after 9.59am, but also running to a seat is mostly unnecessary. The Finance Minister's speech is around midday and there are opportunities for questions. The main takeaway is that you'll have way less time than you think you'll have.

There's extension boards provided for laptop charging, and water and coffee available throughout. Lunch usually depends on when the Finance Minister's speech ends, which could be 12.30pm or later on. Have a substantial breakfast, and bring your own snacks and food. There's nothing worse than trying to write about OBEGALx while your stomach stages its own fiscal crisis on you. If you're short on time before the lockup starts, Copperfields is across from the banquet hall and has perfectly palatable pre-packaged sandwiches and the like.

Any internet use, of course, is prohibited. There is a WiFi network setup, but only for access to a PDF version of the Budget in addition to the paper copies.

The lockup officially ends at 2pm, however, journalists have the ability to use the internet from 1.50pm to "start preparations to transmit information" for when the Budget embargo lifts at 2pm. This is all in the agreement you electronically agree to beforehand, and which has been clear in the past on consequences.

Figure out what you're doing first

Before discussing how to analyse the Budget, it's worth considering the kind of coverage you want to do. Time management is critical, and solo Substacker-style reporting is tricky in this environment if you want to hit a 2pm deadline. Someone will need to decide on whether you are going for depth or breadth. This depends a lot on the audience you're writing for, what you want to report and analyse on, the size of your team, and when your deadline is.

In most general interest news situations, where you need to both hit deadline and cover the main points, you'll need some breadth first and depth second. Just reading through Government press releases will take you a minimum of 30 minutes, even if you're a fast reader. This initial scan is essential unless someone else on your team is already handling it, in which you can choose to zero in on a particular issue or something like BEFU.

Additionally with a team around you, the golden rule is, what needs to be done at Parliament gets done in Parliament; anything that doesn't need to be done from the banquet hall should be done elsewhere. Use people outside the lockup to their fullest, so you're not wasting time on tasks others could handle.

Gather your offline documents

Here's what you should bring in.

1. HYEFU
2. Previous Budgets
3. Articles on potentially headline-making story angles
4. Coalition agreements
5. Commentaries from bank economists

Download PDFs of HYEFU, previous Budgets, and previous BEFUs. You'll want to know what the Government had on the books beforehand, and what Treasury's assessment of fiscal conditions were previously. If you're expecting something noteworthy on a particular topic, bring whatever you'd typically use to write a story outside of lock-up. If you know specific changes are coming (such as changes to KiwiSaver or fees-free e.g.), gather materials to help you understand what might change and the implications ahead of time.

Previous articles, ministerial press releases, speeches, and expert analyses, etc. It's also useful to have copies of coalition agreements, if you're looking at a coalition government's Budget, and the major party's pre-election commitments to voters.

You can also save Budget analyses from major banks, who will have their star economist commentaries out ahead of the big day. Use these if you want to take a deeper look at Treasury's Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU).

If you use the older classic version of Outlook, one handy tip is that the settings might already be configured to store all previously-received emails offline. This can help if you have an offline version of previous govt/opposition press releases already kept without needing to connect to the internet.

Know your Budget documents and anticipate stories

Know in advance the different documents you'll be receiving. Familiarise yourself with their structure and content so you can navigate them efficiently when inside.

The Post's Luke Malpass has a good explainer on what all of these mean. In my case, the most important ones are BEFU and the Summary of Initiatives. You should learn to understand how to tell when funding is being removed or added, and how to read across forecast periods for different spending initiatives. You should also note that ministerial press releases are given to you in one big stack. They do not distinguish between pre-Budget and Budget Day announcements.

It's also important to try and spot potential stories ahead of time. This can come either via the conveniently-left, but sometimes deceptive, tea leaves given ahead of time, or the other announcements where ministers have deferred decision-making to the Budget or been silent about prior commitments. For example, National's cancer drug commitment was made in 2023 and exposed as, at best, a work-in-progress programme at the following year's Budget.

It has never been my main focus in a lockup, but it's important that at least some journos focus on the nitty-gritty numbers in the Budget documentation. The press releases will almost certainly try to mislead you. Good details-oriented policy and finance journos, given time to do their work, can cut through all of that from the lock-up.

Talk to Treasury

They're sitting obsequiously off to the side as reporters bash away at keyboards. It is the humble "Treasury official", going by their name tag.

If you have time, then flagging an analyst down is an good opportunity to understand policy or a fiscal forecast in greater detail. I've always felt it a shame that the only times I've used them has been to nail down details which aren't included in the announcement press releases. There's also a range of tax experts, economists and other interest group voices that will be inside the lockup and available for reaction. Plan and use them to your advantage.

Tech toolkit

If you're used to using Google Docs, now is time to get comfy with Microsoft Word, which will be a lot easier to handle without internet. Consider also using HTTrack, website copying software for Windows, which lets you scrape the entire lockup website from inside the lockup. This gives you the ability to search through the website's entire index of Budget docs, through the layman's File Explorer, faster than if you were manually downloading each file.

You'd also ideally want a voice memos app which can transcribe recordings while offline. This is ideal for the Finance Minister's speech and ensuing questions. Apple's default app allows this but the quality can be so-so.

Being ready to use a portable phone hotspot is also useful for accessing the internet before the lockup begins and when you're allowed to use the internet again at the very end.

One area I'm curious on monitoring is the continued rise of offline open-weight LLMs. I haven't previously used one of these in a lockup situation such as Budget before, but tools such as NotebookLM, Claude, and others have previously proven their worth in quickly scanning and synthesising information from large documents in online situations. I wouldn't be surprised if this was an area where there could be benefits for lockup journos in years to come. But at the moment, these models rely on very high-end GPUs, have enormous storage requirements, and have severe hallucination issues, which makes them pretty impractical in a time-sensitive environment, such as the Budget.