The hangover

It's no secret that shadow communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy didn't have a good day on Wednesday.

Full Duplex doesn't know whether -- like many high-flyers from Australia's telco community -- the politician was suffering a hangover after ATUG's annual awards on Tuesday night.

But being called "a factional wheeler-and-dealer ... who masquerades as one of our four parliamentary leaders" by his Labor colleague Simon Crean on national television -- while the ATUG dinner was in full swing -- was probably worse.

In any case, Conroy's speech at the ATUG conference on Wednesday morning did not go down well.

Despite speaking directly after his Liberal counterpart Senator Helen Coonan, Conroy did little to rebut the minister's comments or policies.

Upon the completion of his speech -- which Coonan didn't wait to hear -- you could have heard a pin drop as ATUG chief Rosemary Sinclair opened the floor for questions.

Not a single member of the high-flying audience wanted to ask Conroy anything about his communications policy.

The shadow minister subsequently left, to be peppered with questions from my fellow journalists about Crean's comments.

On a lighter note, the dinner itself was fantastic.

I had a chance to swap stories with the fibre-optic kings from PIPE Networks, as well as a bunch of other people.

A few souls were brave enough to tell me some telco jokes for this blog, which should appear in the next few days.

Here's hoping it goes as well next year ... and that this year's hangovers weren't too onerous.