The Prime Minister likes to frame the unwinding of pandemic health and economic measures as “coming out from under the doona, the infantilising implication being that we’re cowering from the ficticious boogeyman. Scott Morrison and the Government, the clear-eyed adults gently beckoning us to come out, into reaity and normalcy.

However, the Government are stuck under their own ideological doona, from which they steadfastly refuse to emerge from, the consequences of such disengagement left for those of us outside to compensate.

Primarily, the primacy of neoliberal economic ideology prevents the Government from any activity that may subvert the primacy of the market-based economy.

Clearly, they were forced to intervene once it became clear that the pandemic-induced demand contraction would wreak total havoc on the base structure of the economy.

The April Labour Force statistics, along with JobKeeper and JobSeeker data illustrate this starkly. Six million out of the 12.4 million employed in Australia are on the JobKeeper salary subsidy. That is, six million Australians have their salary of up to $750 a week paid for by the Government, in order to keep them officially employed.

This is possibly the most radical government intervention in the economy in Australian history, and is commensurate to the degree of this particular crisis of capitalism.

There are two fundamental questions.

Firstly: The minimum wage in Australia is $740 a week, the median wage (August 2019) $1100 a week. There are a significant portion of workers subsidised at a rate far less than their salaried remuneration – how will this affect post-lockdown sentiment and consumption?

Secondly: Given pre-existing economic pessimism, variability of lockdown easing across the nation, the timeboxed nature of enhanced government subsidies, and the uncertain possiblity of a snap-back recovery, how many of those precariously receiving JobKeeper will find themselves miserably queueing for JobSeeker?

That is, can this economy survive without crutches?

The pre-pandemic economy was rife with structural issues, many exacerbated by its own policies, that the Governemnt sought to downplay or ignore. Instead, it repeated and repeated its own view of reality, as if to throw its ideological doona over its mess.

In this unfolding catastrophe, who exactly needs to come out into the cold?

Those living precariously, barely affording rent, not knowing whether their job will exist when September ends? The millions finally receiving enough welfare to eat three meals a day, who have Poverty Day marked on their calendars?

Or those neoliberal warriors in the government and commentariat who demand human sacrifice to appease The Line?