Monthly Archives: May 2020

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, said the UAE must rein in its "culture of excess".

The Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces called for needless overspending and food waste to be tackled and the natural resources of the Emirates to be protected.

Hosting his online Ramadan majlis with Mariam Almheiri, Minister of State for Food Security, he said he believed the public would be receptive to the need to move away from unwanted habits.

Food security is a holistic ecosystem that pertains to not only food production, but also addresses the culture of handling food or the culture of rationalism and avoiding overuse and waste," Sheikh Mohamed said during the video conference.

We have a habit of excess that we need to restrain

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed

"We have a habit of excess that we need to restrain. If this excess or overspending is for a good cause, like charity, it is good and we support it, but overspending for no reason is bad.

"This is a key part of the food security strategy: how to think of our various natural resources such as water, food sources, energy and others.

As we talk about rationalism and eliminating overuse, I would like to thank you for your efforts in educating people, because as you know, brothers and sisters, it is a cultural habit one that comes from traditions that is hard to move away from without some challenges.

"We want to part ways with such traditions that are not useful to us and not Islamic as well.

"This requires work in homes, schools and through different media outlets to raise awareness.

"UAE citizens and residents are very receptive and responsive. We can raise awareness about this issue to our people in the UAE and we will witness change very quickly."

The majlis, titled Nourishing the Nation: Food Security in the UAE, gave insight into the measures being taken by the ministry to tackle the challenges posed to food security by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UAE at this time was not and will not be affected, whether its local produce, stockpile or imports," Sheikh Mohamed said.

He said the country was passing the test presented by an outbreak that has affected the lives of billions of people across the globe.

He said the UAE was playing a key role in supporting other nations by delivering essential aid.

Coronavirus was a test and I would like to stress in front of the others, that it was a test for you [Ms Almheiri] specifically in terms of food and we passed it due to your plans and your level of readiness.

"Surely, there might be some shortages but you are feeding a country, a nation of nearly 10 million people, without noticeable change.

"Some countries were impacted. We wish them well and sympathise with them, and that is why you saw how your country, the UAE, rushed to send them aid.

"The UAE sent aid to nearly 10 countries every week. It is our duty towards our brothers, allies and friends as we see some countries in a difficult situation."

Ms Almheiri said the UAE took steps to ensure it had ample food supplies, including setting up the Emirates Food Security Council to help co-ordinate a national effort.

As soon as the global pandemic hit, the council held an extraordinary meeting to develop an early mechanism system to monitor food imports and local food production capacity potential," she said.

"The council also connected with the Food Security Alliance companies in the UAE to best prepare for all scenarios.

In a way, going through this crisis is testing whether we have set up robust systems, and it has shown that this strategy has set the right foundation to be able to overcome this crisis.

We get our food through imports and local production but because of the harsh environment we import large amounts of our food.

Ms Almheiri said many did not realise that the UAE grew so much food.

Last month, it was revealed that close to 6 million tonnes of food was produced in the UAE each year, reflecting a growing shift away from a dependence on imported goods.

Local farms have ramped up production and more local produce has begun appearing on supermarket shelves.

Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Presidential Affairs, said stores in Abu Dhabi would now dedicate a section to promote locally grown produce.

Updated: May 7, 2020 11:17 AM

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Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed calls for end to 'culture of excess' to protect food security - The National

An Iranian flag flies at the Sorough oil field in 2005.(Raheb Homavandi/Reuters)A new book on the SunniShia conflict makes clear that the steady radicalization of sectarian difference in the Middle East was not inevitable.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLEWhen youve done your days viewing of government coronavirus briefings Governor Cuomos, Governor Newsoms, President Trumps spare a minute for Grand Ayatollah Khameneis. In a cozy fireside-chat format, Irans Supreme Leader has been taking the opportunity presented by this moment of shared global suffering to remind the world that the true enemy of mankind is not epidemic disease, but the vicious, lying, brazen, avaricious, cruel, merciless, terrorist United States, and atheist, materialist Western civilization.

Throughout the Middle East Khameneis clients provide a steady chorus for this kind of invective. One consequence is that the claim he is now broadcasting that the U.S. government intentionally created the coronavirus has become a commonplace among his adherents. A French historian once described the young Ali Khamenei as the Robespierre of the Iranian Revolution. We are living in the world in which Robespierre won the one in which that most radical and bloodthirsty of revolutionaries lives on, in his dotage, to spread his message to millions over social media.

Laurence Lours new book is a reminder of quite how much the world has lost by not having a responsible regime in Iran. Sunnis and Shia is principally an exploration of that second great Islamic denomination, which revolves around the figure of Mohammeds son-in-law, Ali ibn Abu Talib, known as the first Shiite Imam. Lour shows how reason and the embrace of rationalism is central to Shia faith and theology, and explains the contextualism that allows its clergy to adapt to social and historical change in ways denied to their majority Sunni counterparts. She emphasizes Shiisms historic role as a creed of social justice, a movement of the weak against the strong, and of the people against unjust rulers alongside a Sunni orthodoxy that embraces hierarchy and established authority. It was Shiism that would have been the faith most naturally predisposed to bring about a reconciliation of Islam with Western scientific modernity and yet it is everywhere submerged under the atavism of its political leaders, from Khamenei to Hezbollah to Iraqs rival sectarian warlords. The world has lost not just by the absence of a moderate Iran, but of a moderate Shia power.

The early history is well known. Ali, who had married Mohammeds daughter Zaynab, became the fourth Muslim Caliph in 656, almost a quarter of a century after Mohammeds death in 632. But his reign coincided with deepening division in the growing Arab Caliphate and, amid a revolt led by a powerful rival in Syria, Ali was assassinated in 661. The Sunni Caliphate was continued from Damascus, but Alis followers broke away and recognized his descendants as a lineage of divinely appointed Imams who would lead a community of true Muslims. When the third Imam, Alis son Hussein, was killed in 680 in battle with the forces of the Caliph, his martyrdom became a focal point of Shiite belief commemorated in the festival of Ashura, and the site of his death in Karbala in southern Iraq became one of the main sites of Shiite pilgrimage alongside Alis mausoleum in Najaf.

The story of the Shiite Imams to follow is almost a parody of factionalism and its calcified remains still lie dotted across the map of the modern Middle East. A dispute over the succession to the fourth Imam (d. 713) produced a splinter group known as the Zaydis, who went on to dominate the politics and government of northern Yemen for over a thousand years. A dispute over the succession to the sixth Imam (d. 765) brought us the Ismailis, who now reside in the south of present-day Saudi Arabia, and the Lebanese Druze. The lack of charisma shown by the tenth and eleventh Imams allowed a pretender to arise in the 870s, bequeathing to us the Alawites, whose successors are still hanging on to power as the rulers of modern Syria.

These petty sects are better known as Alidism. Mainstream Shiism, by contrast, was the creation of the educated and prosperous clergy of southern Iraq in the ninth century. Frustrated by the proliferation of radical creeds, and impatient with ineffectual Imams, the Shia ulema hit upon a deus ex machina in the claim that the twelfth Imam a minor, with no obvious successor, who presumably died had miraculously disappeared in 874, and would remain hidden until his return on Judgement Day. In the meantime, they would be responsible for interpreting His will and thus the will of God. As the architects and guardians of dogma, these Shiite clergy were able to consolidate Shiism into an organized faith with a sophisticated theology able to rival the established corpus of Sunnism.

The final piece in our contemporary puzzle fell into place in 1501, when a new Safavid king of Persia established Shiism as the official state religion. From that point on, geopolitical and ethnic rivalry was fused with religious schism, as Sunni Ottomans and Shiite Persians confronted one another along a frontier stretching thousands of miles, from the mountains of Kurdistan in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south. In the 20th century, it would be this divide, now separating Iran and Iraq, that would form the bloodiest international border outside Europe one of the few, its worth recalling, that had nothing to do with Western colonialism.

Sunnis and Shia is also concerned with exploring how the sectarian divide has been managed in practice in a range of national contexts in the present day including in Pakistan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. It used to be said of the Washington, D.C., foreign-policy establishment that, having discovered the SunniShia split in the aftermath of the second Iraq war, they started to see its malign hand everywhere. Lours survey is an effective antidote. She makes the commonsense point that the pattern of SunniShia engagement throughout the Islamic world has as often been one of coexistence and cooperation as of sectarian conflict and war. We can find, for example, even in the puritanical Saudi Kingdom large Shiite populations free to apply their own religious law within their community, and whose leaders have served on the kings consultative council. In Bahrain, now a major flash-point, we can find a deep history of Sunni monarchs engaging closely with loyalist Shiite subjects, not least because they were valued by their Sunni rulers as allies against the Communists.

What can we learn from this? Well, one thing that seems emphatically not to be a good solution for managing sectarian difference may be the one that governments and international agencies have long pursued to press Western-style democratic and open political systems upon Middle Eastern societies. Indeed, the main points of SunniShia dispute could hardly have been designed to be more potentially incendiary if freely aired in the public square. One Shia ritual Lour identifies involves the public insulting of Mohammeds earliest Companions and the first three Muslim Caliphs that is, precisely those figures most sacred to Sunnis as models for true religious life. (They are known as the Salaf hence Salafism.) Most modern Shiites have retreated from their early claims that the Koran itself is a Sunni-doctored falsification. But many continue to regard fundamental elements of Sunni worship as false, and do not regard Sunni mosques as real mosques. For their part, Sunnis give as good as they get. Lour tells us that there is a school of Sunni scholars today who maintain that Shiism tout court was created as part of an eighth-century Jewish conspiracy designed to sow discord in the Muslim community. One suspects that increased contact, freer debate, and better understanding, rather than building bridges, would simply make people hate one another more.

In a political world that requires tact and subtlety, where struggling factions reach for recognition and toleration, rather than radical equality, there can be nothing so dangerous as religious entrepreneurs promising political utopias which brings us back to Ayatollah Khamenei. In each of Lours national audits, the story since 1979 is one of extremist violence and steady radicalization of sectarian difference, as Tehrans efforts to export revolution throughout the region transformed once-integrated Shiite communities into vectors for Iranian influence and interest. The Shiite pressure groups and civil-society organizations of the 1970s became the Islamic Liberation Fronts of the 1980s. Coup attempts replaced compromise, as in Bahrain in 1981.

Many of these national scenes have yet to recover and so long as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards exist to freewheel around the region as gun-runners and king-makers, it is difficult to see how recovery begins. One doesnt have to admire John Bolton to share his hope that Irans current rulers will come to an unpleasant end, sooner rather than later. In the meantime, Sunnis and Shia is a reminder of all the reasons to be excited for what may come, once they do.

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What the World Has Lost in Iran - National Review

From Plato to Heidegger, philosophers have taken a dim view of the common people. That, however, began to change when the common people turned into a mass-reading public hungry for a little philosophy, under the delusion that the subject has something interesting to say about the meaning of life. A number of pop philosophers emerged to meet this demand, some of them admirable such as Simon Blackburn, others more like the slightly sozzled character you bump into in a bar who thinks the stars spell out some momentous statement. The line between the pop and the pub philosopher is easy to cross.

One way of making things easier on your audience is to avoid a philosophers ideas and talk about his or her life instead. Very few readers understand the synthetic a priori or the law of the excluded middle, but a lot of them know about falling in love or what it feels like to be miserable. It helps, however, if the life of the thinker in question is reasonably exciting. This was certainly the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who fought in the first world war, had a number of illegal gay relationships, lived in a hut on a Norwegian fiord and had to do a runner as a village schoolmaster when he struck a pupil across the face.

The problem with the American philosopher William James, founder of so-called pragmatism, is that his life, externally at least, was about as exciting as a slugs. He was born in New York in 1842, the brother of the novelist Henry James and the grandson of an Irishman from the small Ulster town of Ballyjamesduff, who emigrated to the US and made an enormous fortune from banking and real estate. As an academic psychologist, William spent most of his life teaching at Harvard, and in his later years was fascinated by ghosts, table-rapping and general spookery. He also discovered he could attain a kind of Nirvana with the help of laughing gas. As a celebrated public intellectual, he preached a number of standard liberal pieties, including respect for the individual and the sanctity of personal freedom.

None of this was likely to set the Hudson on fire, so John Kaag has found various ways to liven up his subject. The first is to say as little about the intricacies of pragmatism as is decently possible. Popularly caricatured as the belief that truth is what works, it is more accurately a highly sophisticated creed for which truth is what, in the long run, makes a difference to the world. Kaag conveys something of this, while saying nothing at all about its notorious problems. He also tells us rather vacuously that pragmatism is about life and its amelioration and that its exponents study lifes value and worth, adding the stunning revelation that human thought (is) personal, continuous and changing.

In a curious way, it is pragmatism itself that licenses Kaags reluctance to delve into its subtleties. For if it is often described as the first distinctively American school of philosophy, it is partly because its critique of European rationalism can be made to merge into good old American anti-intellectualism. Kaag is all for the feel and taste of immediate experience, in contrast to some arid scheme of thought, and so is James; but in Jamess case this takes the form of a rigorous inquiry into truth and meaning, whereas rigorous is the last adjective one would use to characterise this book. We are told, for example, that the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was an idealist (he was in fact a materialist) and that Darwin taught that the weak shall perish, which is not what the doctrine of the survival of the fittest means.

Kaags cracker-barrel wisdom is occasionally punctuated by forays into his own biography, given that Jamess life fails to yield much drama. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds belongs to the American confessional genre, which runs all the way from Puritanism to Norman Mailer. As befits the Me generation, it is as much about the author as his subject. James is sometimes no more than a convenient peg on which Kaag can hang his dishevelled thoughts about getting divorced, his predictably beautiful daughter, getting divorced again and so on. We learn that he has a beer at five oclock every day, that as a kid he was uncoordinated and stuttered badly, and that his daughter swallowed some amniotic fluid on the way out of the womb but quickly recovered. He even threatens us with a future book on bringing up a child as divorced parents. It isnt obvious quite what any of this has to do with, say, the pragmatist claim that truth can only be established retrospectively, or indeed with the life of James, but like many an autobiographer Kaag seems to assume that others will be as interested in the small change of his own existence as he is himself.

Another way of peddling philosophy to the masses is to package it as spiritual therapy, for which there is a seemingly endless appetite. Hence the whimsical subtitle of this book: How William James Can Save Your Life. In reality, Kaag has to admit that James didnt so much save his life as, rather less sensationally, save him from depression. He tells us how as a young man he felt life was meaningless, as indeed did James himself. In truth, for an East Coast Brahmin with a liberal father and without material worries, he was something of a psychological mess. As well as a Sartrean sense of nausea at the futility of existence, he suffered from partial blindness and was haunted by thoughts of suicide.

Then, in a moment of enlightenment, James discovered that the world was not entirely governed by determinism and that there was something called free will. Like knowing where Sweden is, this is a discovery most of us have made without much sense of spiritual illumination. Kaag reads about his masters conversion and becomes equally life-affirming. There is a widespread prejudice in the Unites States that pessimism is somehow unpatriotic, along with the falsehood that you can be anything you like as long as you set your mind to it. In the end, James turns out to be exemplary of the power of positive thinking. The point of philosophy is to sort yourself out. William Jamess entire philosophy, from beginning to end, Kaag writes, was geared to save a life, his life. It is a typically imprecise claim.

It is no accident that Jamess brother Henry is among the finest stylists of the English language, given Williams own supple, graceful prose. Kaags literary style is rather less elegant: Nope, I sort of get it, sure as hell, to sweat a bunch and so on. But writing popularly doesnt mean you have to write badly. And being attuned to the nuances of everyday experience, as James taught us to be, doesnt mean you have to be suspicious of abstract ideas. What else is free will?

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life is published by Princeton (RRP 18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag review can William James save your life? - The Guardian

Amidst a welter of commentary about how momentous this Thursday's Budget will be, how about this for a prediction? Prepare to be disappointed.

To those on the left, who hope the Government will have crafted a new, green utopia: forget it. Like the rest of us, they're still trying to work out what's hit them.

There will be plenty of nods in the direction of climate change resilience, but also plenty of new roads and fast-track resource management legislation to get the economy moving again.

To the promoters of so-called 'shovel-ready' projects, who hope $170 billion of aspiration can be jammed into maybe $5 billion to $10 billion of immediately available capital spending: forget it.

The list of possible projects is so long and the ability to fund them so inevitably limited that there will be disappointment aplenty.

To small and medium-sized business owners hoping there's more in the kitty for them: forget it. The wage subsidy scheme and the various cashflow measures to date - in particular, the almost haphazard conversion of the tax department into a bank of last resort - are probably as good as it's going to get.

HELP FOR TOURISM

The only likely exceptions to that: tourism operators and associated parts of hospitality and the events sector.

Even there, there is only so much a government can do when the reality for many is that their businesses will be either much smaller or unable to operate until international tourists return - whenever that may be.

Some of the help for these sectors will target retraining for the employees who must swiftly find a new trade.

Even trade unions, who have been closer to the emergency policy-making action than they have been for years during normal times, may not welcome Finance Minister Grant Robertson's enthusiasm for encouraging small, entrepreneurial businesses to flourish.

Disappointed, too, will be the modern monetary policy theorists who think central banks should simply fund everything that everybody wants out of thin air. It is tempting to think that's already happening, with the Reserve Bank pumping up financial market liquidity by buying government bonds at unprecedented levels.

But Robertson is no fan of that. He knows debt created today must, some day in some way, be paid back. And he values the fact that New Zealand has had its super-strong credit ratings reconfirmed in recent days. Maintaining that credibility - hard-won over the past four decades - remains important for a small, open economy.

However, Roger Douglas, who kicked off that path to credibility, will be disappointed too. Robertson delivered a curt "no" when asked last week whether he'd read the latest think-piece from the reforming Labour finance minister whose radical egalitarianism remains as chronically misunderstood as ever.

ON THE BACKBURNER

Perhaps most disappointed of all will be those who were looking forward to the progressive political investment agenda outlined in the Budget policy statement in December last year. Robertson was very clear last week: unless there are cost pressures that must be addressed, those priorities are shelved for now.

Nor will there be much, if anything, for anyone hoping for a fairer tax system. It is far too early to start raising taxes to pay for the current debt pile-up and it would be political suicide to broach the debate that must be revived about the taxation of wealth.

For taxpayers on middle incomes who are now paying the top income tax rate, there might be a skerrick of relief, but dealing to fiscal drag is something even governments with strong books resist. Now is not the time.

A UTILITARIAN SHORTLIST

Instead, this Budget is a first, inevitably imperfect attempt to get to grips with one of the biggest shocks the New Zealand economy has ever experienced, and which is not over yet.

So, rather than a utopian wishlist, how about a utilitarian shortlist of five key things to watch for in this Thursday's Budget?

1 - Budget surpluses

Firstly, will the word 'surplus' appear in the Budget documents? For all Robertson's rejection of Roger Douglas, it is an enduring Douglas legacy that New Zealand governments have both striven for and produced Budget surpluses whenever they could during the past 30 years.

In an interview last week, Robertson avoided the word, carefully defining his ambition as a "sustainable" fiscal position, with a focus more on the level of net Crown debt than whether income exceeds expenditure any time in the next decade.

That may simply be prudent. It's likely that current forecasts show Budget deficits as far as the eye can see because of the size of the economic crater made by covid-19.

However, the rhetorical ambition to return to surplus is a political as much as an economic totem. Its inclusion or exclusion will be significant in itself.

2 - Treasury forecasts

On Budget day, it will be exactly a month since the Treasury released its first set of scenarios outlining possible paths for the economy post-covid.

These were not forecasts but guesstimates based on various possible outcomes for the global and domestic economy. If anything, the scenarios given greatest credence were less apocalyptic than might have been expected. Unemployment was low, back under 5 percent, within four years and the economy bounces back strongly to be as large in 2022 as it was in 2019.

That picture will have changed in the intervening weeks, but by how much?

The important thing will be the direction rather than the extent of change. No one can accurately predict anything about the economy right now. The disruption is so great that Statistics New Zealand probably can't even be sure it's collecting all the right data at the moment.

Instead, it's the frequency of updates that matters. This week's forecasts are a way-station before the production of pre-election fiscal and economic updates in late August, assuming the election goes ahead on Sept. 19.

3 - Level 1 and the trans-Tasman travel bubble

The Australian government has so far been franker than ours about a timeline to something close to normal life, which includes the potential for open borders between Australia and New Zealand. Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison has talked about the bubble being in place by July. Being able to travel across the Ditch again is less significant than the powerful signal that such a relaxation will give, acting as both a fillip to confidence and as a proxy for confirmation that both countries have the virus under control.

Will our government chance its arm by nominating its own timetable, or maintain its currently more conservative stance?

4 - Articulation of a vision

Robertson talked last week about the opportunity to use covid-19 to "build back better." It should be far too early to give anything more than a verbal outline of what this means, with perhaps one or two symbolic but probably low-cost pointers.

However, the way the government talks about the role of government in this Budget is vital. If it says too little, it will be suspected of developing an agenda that it doesn't want to discuss before the election.

Equally, it must judge carefully how much and exactly what it says about these ambitions because they will be key to the themes of the election campaign. The government is already a far larger player in the economy than it was possible even to imagine two months ago.

For some, this is an opportunity to rebuild a fairer, better society and economy. For others, it threatens to march New Zealand backwards into a low productivity, state-directed future where capital is allocated politically and a generation of economic rationalism is unwound.

By the time the election rolls around, the covid-19 virus will be less the focus than the unemployment, business closures and hardship its impact will wreak. The competition of ideas for how best to get out of this mess will be intense. The Budget is the government's throat-clearing moment for that contest.

5 - How Simon Bridges reacts

The National Party leader has fallen twice at crucial hurdles - first when the initial level 4 lockdown was announced and second in reaction to the move to level 3.

The Budget is a third such hurdle.

If Simon Bridges pitches his tone wrong again this week, the chances of a reluctant but unavoidable attempt at a leadership coup will go through the roof.

- By Pattrick Smellie

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5 things to watch for in the Budget - Otago Daily Times

Men do not face the same dual economy of idleness and intensive work, or the social expectation to teach their children. Their domains of construction, manufacturing and mining are relatively unscathed for the time being, and are well placed for recovery.

This will come as a shock to politicians on both sides who see this recession as an opportunity to revive industry protection, and those on the fringes who want to take the short cut of xenophobia. This is a pink-collar recession, targeting the better educated half of the country, and the young instead of the old.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Australia faces a realignment of the economy at warp speed. Almost a third of the 950,000 jobs lost across the economy since March 14 have been in accommodation and food services. Most were casual positions. They are not easily restored without a vaccine for COVID-19.

Before the coronavirus, accommodation and food services was the sixth-largest employer in the country with 940,000 workers, representing just over 7 per cent of our entire workforce. Ahead of it in fifth place was education and training services (1.1 million) but behind it was manufacturing (920,000).

Today, it sits in ninth place, with around 630,000 workers. Manufacturing (880,000) has replaced it in sixth place, while public administration and safety, and transport, postal and warehousing have also risen one rung each. The irony is that accommodation and food services were safe havens in the early 1990s recession, with more jobs at the end of the crash than at its commencement.

The second tragedy is what is happening at the bottom end of the jobs ladder, among the sectors that traditionally employed smaller numbers of workers. Before the lockdown, the arts had been ranked 15th of the 19 sectors measured by the ABS, with 250,000 jobs in total. To put that part of our lives in perspective, we had more people in the arts than in mining, or real estate, or information media and telecommunications. Now the arts are ranked second last, with only the electricity sector below it, after losing a quarter of its workforce since March 14.

Australia didn't need to wait for data to know a recession was on the way, long lines at Centrelink told the story.Credit:Nick Moir

The ABS says 8.1 per cent of all jobs held by women and 6.2 per cent of jobs held by men have disappeared since March 14. This suggests the unemployment rates for men and women will diverge sharply. At the last recession, the male unemployment rate peaked at 12 per cent; 1.5 point higher than the female unemployment rate.

You could see this economic, and cultural crisis coming from the moment Scott Morrison announced stage two of the lockdowns on Sunday, March 22, which closed pubs, cinemas, restaurants, gyms and churches.

Australians did not need to wait six months for the data to come in, or to hear if the Prime Minister or Treasurer thought this was the recession we had to have. It was livestreamed the very next morning, in the long, anxious queues outside Centrelink offices in high income postcodes like Bondi Junction, and in the clueless response of Stuart Robert, the minister for government services, who thought a 15-fold increase in traffic on the MyGov website was a cyberattack.

By this point, the government had already fired two shots of stimulus at the economy a $35.4 billion package on March 12 directed primarily at businesses, and a further $26.7 billion on March 22 aimed at those who lost their jobs. But confidence was in freefall because the government was missing a critical element, the relationship between employer and employee. Businesses, and organisations, had no incentive to hang on to staff. On the contrary, the doubling of the dole on March 22 was the signal to sack.

The scale of the JobKeeper payment, announced on March 29, showed the government finally understood the forces it had unleashed. At $130 billion, it was more than double the combined cost of the first two attempts to stabilise the economy for lockdown.

We now have enough information from employers to judge the effectiveness of that monumental intervention. The ABS data records the sharpest fall in employment occurred in the week immediately after the JobKeeper announcement. This seems counter-intuitive until you realise who was excluded from the payment casual workers with less than 12 months at the same business, or organisation. That is why the hospitality and the arts sectors have been ground zero for retrenchments.

The Morrison government is treating these younger workers as expendable, and has refused to countenance extending the JobKeeper program to protect them. They are being supported at the moment by the doubling of the dole. But what happens when restrictions are eased, but there are no jobs for this group to go back to because entertainment and cultural life is permanently hobbled by social distancing policies?

Does the government cut the dole by half to its pre-pandemic level, and hope this jolts young people to look for another career?

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It is hard to see the Morrison government testing any theory of economic rationalism before the next federal election, especially if the unemployment rate remains above 10 per cent. But it might be tempted by nativism. Higher unemployment increases the scope for scapegoating.

Labors homes affairs spokeswoman Senator Kristina Keneally used an opinion piece in last weekends Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age to call for a review of the temporary migration program. It came with a catchphrase of old Labor. We need a migration program that puts Australian workers first, she wrote.

Morrison didnt bite this week. Migration remains a moot point while the borders remain tightly controlled.

For Labor, it was the wrong fight to pick in a pink-collar recession. Any appeal to the prejudices of older Australians, who are actually hanging on their jobs, will only divert attention from younger Australians who have been short-changed by the lockdown.

George Megalogenis is a journalist, political commentator and author.

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Keneally has picked the wrong fight for this pink-collar recession - The Age