Somewhere, in a bunker, Death is running simulations.

In this grim work, it is opposed by a team of public servants who must advise the government on what, at this time, a good government should do. Sort of red team/blue team but for far higher stakes.

Death and the task force run simulations by playing a game like Go, a Japanese board game. In Go, the objective of a player is to occupy with black or white stones the greatest numbers of squares.

But, at this time, in this bunker, playing this game, black stones represent death and human damage by coronavirus; white stones represent death and human damage by economic recession.

The aim of Death is to maximise the size of the board, the number of stones, death and suffering. The task force works the opposite corner: how best to minimise the size of the board, the number of stones and reduce the deadly hurt visited on women, men and children.

Of the two players, Death plays the stronger hand for it need only wait until the task force makes a mistake.

We should be pleased therefore that the task force—and government—is not conceptualising the protection of our health and the protection of the Australian economy as a zero sum game.

We have had much loose talk recently about how the economy comes first and death and the devil should take the hindmost. Americans were alerted that they should pack churches at Easter; and that the disease should be let run over hill, dale, the sick, the halt, the lame and the old. Australians were advised that infection was the best vaccine and that we should just let a lot of people get it. Londoners were told the panic about coronavirus was madness and that it wasn’t the Black Death and they should get on with normal life.

On the other hand, we have had voices yelling at the Australian Government to shut down the whole show. Put the whole place in lockdown and put the Australian economy in a headlock. We can ignore these cries for they pay no account to the profound human harm to women, men and children that is caused by an economic depression. For proof, just ask Australians living on the south coast of NSW how they are faring.

Sitting as most of us do on the sidelines, we find it hard to imagine the pressure on governments, on public servants, and just how difficult it is to make and implement good choices. At this moment, decisions about policy, about specific initiatives, are made quickly, sometimes with only scant information about the present and less knowledge of possible futures. Not unexpectedly, mistakes are made when the operational imperative is to implement now, today—or yesterday.

And so we have to give credit to the Prime Minister and premiers for navigating a way to the least-cost solution: steadily wind contact back and economically support individuals and businesses.

The measures taken so far—a package of support totalling $189 billion including the waiving of mutual obligation, an increase in income support and payments to households, support for business, the JobKeeper payment, the childcare initiatives—deserve our applause. They are evidence that expertise in government matters, that careful analysis matters, that not everything in government can or should be reduced to a ministerial spreadsheet.

The Government has been criticised for getting too slowly out of the blocks in its economic response. And there is some truth in this. Its efforts to tell Australia what has been happening, what government is doing and why, have been woeful. And if the Prime Minister should take credit for the good the Government has done then he should understand that his own performance as a communicator has been close to inept. Most Australians would rather infect themselves with the plague than subject themselves to yet another briefing by the Prime Minister on disease control.

But in the long term these are not fatal criticisms—provided the Government seizes the opportunities that are vested in this crisis. We cannot go on as we have before.

Too often, the Government that has demonstrated that it has no love for the careful work of government. For example, last year, in high Bourbon style, our Prime Minister told Australians that ministers were the policy makers. Expert public servants were, well, just servants: useful enough for the drudgery of fetching and carrying.

Recommendations by the Thodey committee to make the APS fit for future purpose—for example, to abolish the Average Staff rule—were acknowledged by the Government with the bored wave of an indifferent hand. An efficiency dividend of $1.5 billion is still to be stripped from agency budgets, one knows not where. Machinery of government changes have wreaked administrative havoc on agencies for zero demonstrable gain. The effort to reduce welfare fraud transformed the Department of Human Services from a service agency whose duty was to support the most vulnerable into a standover racket that unlawfully collected monies that were labelled as debts.

Deficits were bad; taxes were worse; small surpluses were good; big surpluses were always better.

Well, chickens are now coming home to roost.

The next months and years are going to be murderous hard.

Unemployment will rocket; economic growth will collapse. A generation who feel as though they have been locked out of home ownership will find themselves locked out of jobs.

At the same time, the costs of managing a climate that is warming in a catastrophic way and an international environment that is uncertain and increasingly hostile to Australia’s interests will only consume resources and attention. Our system of taxes and transfers is profoundly unfair and inefficient. That we are not discussing these issues at this moment does not mean that they somehow will go away.

And so a good government, even as it responds to this particular crisis, will be thinking about and preparing for the world ahead. A good start would be to protect and enhance the technical expertise, the capability and capacity of the public service experts whose advice will help us make it to the other side.