Bernard Keane
Politics editor @BernardKeane
Bernard Keane is Crikey’s political editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
Young people are paying the highest price for our response to the crisis, and will be doing so for decades to come. We need to start repaying our debt to them.
The speed with which the US jobs market is collapsing is far worse than even pessimists feared.
Viruses are stuck moving at the pace that humans move. And now we're moving at a dizzying pace, on the way to a very different future to the one we imagined at the start of the year.
The Home Affairs portfolio has been dysfunctional for years, and never held to account. Why should we expect any different now that it is charged with protecting us from the coronavirus?
This week: some non-virus content, some virus content, the crime in Yemen, shakespeare was a hack, and Side View says 'see ya' (for now).
There'll be no v-shaped recovery, or even a u-shaped recovery, from the crisis. It will be highly uneven, and governments may not have a lot of say in how it pans out.
After the Global Financial Crisis, governments retreated from interventionism. This time around, they're less likely to abandon the powers they are currently wielding.
We'll be paying for the government's extraordinary wage subsidy package for decades to come. But the cost of inaction would be far steeper.
The recession now unfolding is a services-led slowdown that hits our economy right where it has been strongest over recent decades.
Unemployment has surged to 3 million in a week as the coronavirus crisis hits the US services sector.
