If the Australian economy is to emerge from hibernation stronger than when it entered the hole, the way we go about our economic lives will need to change.

Among the many economic casualties of the COVID-19 crisis is the federal budget. A projected surplus for this financial year will now be a combined deficit during the year and next of well over $250 billion.

A cavalier attitude of too many young people towards COVID-19, on display on warm Sydney days at Bondi Beach last week, has forced the hand of governments to close down large parts of the Australian economy.

Even postponing a budget surplus for the next financial year is likely to mean a lingering recession.

Already the shrieks of outrage have sounded in response to Anthony Albanese’s announcement that Labor is committed to a target of zero net carbon emissions by 2050.

Without an arms-length process to control federal sports grants, vote buying will further erode trust in politics.

The big trading partners are mulling a carbon tax on Australian exports, which could send the economic costs of climate inaction through the roof.

Economists need to reimagine wages policy. Policies developed from textbooks for the 1980s are not appropriate for the 2020s.

As a result of chaotic policy making, Australia has a looming energy crisis. As long as the federal government’s obsession with new coal-fired generation continues, a stable policy framework will remain out of reach.

Beyond the Castle-like “vibe of the thing” it’s important to examine the material benefits China enjoys from its status and the damage it is inflicting on our two countries and the rest of the developed world.

A young professional woman who has left work to have children is penalised heavily when seeking to resume her career. Australia couldn’t have designed a more inequitable tax and transfer system for working mothers if we tried. 

Depending on how deeply the rivers of gold are flowing from China, the various policy options open to the government might put the political promise of a budget surplus at risk. But pursuing a surplus at the cost of jobs and wages would have its own political consequences and is likely to be economically irresponsible.

Government promises of lower electricity prices cannot be kept through popular, ad hocinterventions that will elevate levels of sovereign risk, killing off the new investments in electricity generation the country desperately needs to offer globally competitive electricity prices

It’s a tragedy that Trump and Johnson, both promising to make their nations great again at the expense of others, have not. Or worse, that they know the lessons, but their vanity drives them to ignore history at the world’s peril.

China is challenging the global, rules-based strategic system, which it considers is stacked against it, while America is challenging the global, rules-based trading system, which it considers is stacked against it. We are witnessing history in the making.

Bob Hawke’s memorial service last week reminds us not only of what was achieved by Hawke, Keating and their cabinets in fashioning Australia’s open, competitive economy, but what could be achieved for the future by building upon their model. Speeches delivered by prime minister Scott Morrison and opposition leader Anthony Albanese signalled a level of bipartisan support for the Hawke-Keating model, but self-evidently the reforms of three decades ago cannot simply be repeated.

By now, Treasury officials will be making their way to meet the Treasurer, carrying their blue book – the incoming government brief. It will contain Treasury’s economic and fiscal forecasts. They will confirm a slowing economy and a deteriorating budget bottom line, making it challenging for the government to keep all its election promises.

Bob Hawke told me he had lived a full life, full of love, and had achieved everything he could. He was ready to go, but we will miss him terribly. The Glee Club will never be the same.

“ I soon learned his secret. Bob worked hard and played hard, while always separating the two. Well, almost always, an exception being those midweek horse races in which he had bet on what he called ‘a conveyance.’ “

Those demanding that their tax shelters remain open have their usual allies in the Liberal and National parties. But this time they are joined by the once-serious mainstream media, which demands economic reform in the national interest while opposing measures designed to achieve it.