A prime minister delivers a light-hearted - even hilarious - speech to more than 600 frocked-up and tuxedoed guests in the Great Hall of Parliament House.
Part of the speech, captured on someone's smart phone and showing Malcolm Turnbull delivering a convincing impression of President Donald Trump's essential absurdity, ends up - entirely unsurprisingly - in a Nine Network news report by Laurie Oakes.
"It was leaked," cry the twitterati. "How terrible. The speech was off the record. You can't trust journalists."
Here's the news.
Nothing was "leaked", because nothing was off-the-record in any world where off-the-record has a meaning. Mr Turnbull, a former journalist, knows this. And who knows whether the footage was delivered to Laurie Oakes, who wasn't at the event, by a journalist?
The point is that more than half those who witnessed the speech being delivered were not journalists, despite this being the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery Mid-Winter Ball.
There were leaders of industry and lobbyists and business executives of all stripe; many had their partners there, too, and political staffers piled in by the table-load.
All the political parties were represented by their chieftains and their leading lights, and sat on media tables. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised for charity.
The mood was relaxed and jolly.
Both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten delivered amusing and occasionally barbed reflections on politics, the media and the world at large. This is the tradition every year, whoever may be prime minister or opposition leader.
Turnbull, subtly linking part of his speech to something everyone knew - that President Donald Trump and his senior aides had leaked their version of a phone call to Turnbull a few months ago - gave an impression of the President that had the hall rocking.
He and Trump shared much, deadpanned Turnbull. "The polls, the polls, we're winning, we're winning! It's beautiful. Not those fake polls."
Turnbull proved he was an excellent performer and that, even at a time when he is under pressure within and without his own party, he has a healthy sense of humour. Much of his speech was an exercise in self-deprecation.
Does anyone seriously imagine the prime minister didn't expect his performance before more than 600 people to reach a wider audience?
So where lies the difficulty about part of his speech finding its way to television screens?
It's this: the press gallery committee each year announces that the ball is "off-the-record".
It is a confected nonsense.
The reason the announcement is made at all is because the offices of the prime minister and the opposition leader claim this is the basis on which the leaders will speak.
Another nonsense, and everyone knows it.
Malcolm Turnbull the former journalist knows the code. Bill Shorten has been around and knows it is a try-on.
An off-the-record conversation or event can occur only when there is prior agreement between all the journalists taking part and the subject, and when privacy exists.
Neither of these requirements is met when half the audience cannot be bound by any journalistic convention.
An industry chief can return to the boardroom and regale the colleagues with a rundown on the speeches, but journalists can't inform their readers? Give us a break.
It is time for an end to the wink-wink, nudge-nudge. The ball is on the record, and the press gallery committee has no business pretending otherwise.
Disclosure: Tony Wright was widely criticised in 2007 for reporting that Treasurer Peter Costello had confided to him and two other journalists at a dinner two years previously that he would destroy John Howard's leadership. Mr Costello claimed the dinner was off the record. In 1985, Wright was found to be in contempt of court by a NSW Supreme Court Judge when he refused to divulge the names of off-the-record contacts in his investigations of organised crime in Griffith, NSW.