Hello and welcome to the last day of this sitting week! Some of you may have a sore head after last night’s Midwinter Ball, to which I say – have some avocado on toast, go for a walk outside and drink some flat lemonade and you’ll be fine. And headache tablets. Take them immediately.

From all accounts the ball was exactly what you would expect – lots of flippery and bigwigs, but pretty boring. It’s time has most likely come and gone, but it will take another few years for the gallery to work that out.

Mike Bowers stayed back for The New Daily and took some of the arrival photos – everyone wants a photo in their finery on the marble hall stairs, so expect to see a lot of pfp with this backdrop for the next little while if you follow political types (the journalists and staffers mostly – MPs usually refrain) on the socials

The teals ready for the Midwinter Ball from left Zali Steggall, Kate Chaney, Dr Monique Ryan, Sophie Scamps, Nicolette Boele and Allegra Spender in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra. (Mike Bowers)

We’ll bring you some more of that in a moment.

Early this morning, David Pocock will be hosting back to back press conferences with Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja and advocates and other MPs on the situation in Gaza, and then the need for gambling reform. That starts from 9am, so if you were at the ball and your job is covering this sort of stuff, better get going finding those avocados.

We will bring you more of the day as it unfolds – you have Amy Remeikis this morning and so far, it is only a two-coffee-morning, but I might have to add a bit of sweetened condensed milk to one to get things going (it’s the last day of a long parliament week and we have a whole other week to go after this, so allow me my vices)

Ready? Let’s get into it.