Four years ago Wayne Swan was preparing what would be his last budget, locking in a decade's worth of spending on schools and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
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This time of year brings back memories of the stress, the intensity, the enormous workload.
"Right now is the busiest and most fraught time in budget preparation," he says.
"All the to-ing and fro-ing about revenue and expenditure would be at its peak right now. Do I miss that? No."
Rather than preparing the budget, nowadays Swan tweets about it. He usually types with one finger, sometimes two.
"I see it as a way to correct the record and cut through the shallow commentary that gets thrown around," he says.
Swan is a no early adopter - in his memoir he recalls eschewing a Blackberry or smartphone in favour of his home fax machine - but he's taken to Twitter with gusto.
"Who would have thought Wayne Swan would be a social media sensation?" NSW senator Sam Dastyari asks with a laugh.
"He's the Bernie Sanders of Australian politics."
Swan, 62, entered Parliament in 1993 and served as treasurer, and later deputy prime minister, throughout the Rudd-Gillard years.
It's rare for ex-treasurers to stay for long when their party loses power. Peter Costello got out after two years; his Labor predecessor, Ralph Willis, after one term.
Swan, by contrast, will stay in Parliament for two terms and perhaps even three.
While Bruce Springsteen and The Eagles posters hang in his office, some colleagues compare Swan to John Paul Young's Yesterday's Hero.
"I thought it was fine for him to hang around for one term but it's strange he's still around," says a Labor frontbencher.
"A lot of his colleagues wonder why he's still there."
In 2015 ALP strategist Cameron Milner - who later served as Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's chief-of-staff - called for Swan to resign, saying, "The hardest thing in politics is knowing when to leave."
Swan insists remaining in Parliament, on the backbench, is the best way for him to advance the Labor cause.
"I want to speak out on the issues I'm passionate about and in a way that's constructive for the Labor Party - not just in the short term but the long term," he says.
"For example I think the highly partisan role played by the Business Council at the moment is something that needs to be targeted and dealt with.
"For them to come to town and say, 'Labor doesn't understand tax' and tell us how we should vote reveals a stunning, pig-headed arrogance that is beyond belief."
Swan certainly does speak freely: "The idea the principal thing we should do to drive growth is give a company tax cut is just bullsh-t ... a third of them pay f---ing nothing."
He's open about his desire to push Shorten and shadow treasurer Chris Bowen to adopt more economically progressive policies such as a 'Buffett Rule'.
Bowen has ruled out adopting the measure, which would force high-income earners forced to pay a mandated minimum rate of tax, but Swan supports it. (Labor colleagues say he's closer to the Left's Tanya Plibersek than his Right faction colleagues Shorten or Bowen.)
"We need to get away from technocratic approaches and back to a more full-throated defence of the interests of working people," Swan says.
"Centre-left parties around the world are performing disastrously and we have to learn from that."
Dastyari, who has taken on big banks and multinational corporations, says: "Wayne has been a mentor to a lot of up-and-coming young MPs and given them cover to question the neo-liberal orthodoxy Labor adopted in the 80s and 90s."
Although Swan hasn't decided whether he will recontest the next election, Dastyari hopes he will.
"It would be a great loss if he left."
