The great economic lesson of the pandemic was that poverty is a policy choice, and inequality is effectively set at the level the government is content with. When the pandemic hit and businesses shut, unemployment was set to soar and the Morrison government realised that more than a million people were about to discover just how impossible it is to survive on $40 a day.
Not only was this politically untenable, but it was also economically disastrous, because the pitiful jobseeker rate would not be enough to sustain the economy during the downturn.
