If Grant Robertson wants to hold onto his well-earned reputation of being one of the few in the current government you’d actually see as being competent professional and effective, then he has to stop turning up to the Friday briefings and finding people doing worse than us.

It was a trick he had in full flight well before the virus when it became increasingly obvious our economy was already in trouble through a variety of poor policy decisions that were seeing immigration tax take and growth slowing fairly rapidly.

He kept using the phrase international headwinds as those it was those headwinds, not the government, that was responsible for the trouble ahead.

The reality, if you remember, is that at the time, our export receipts were at record levels. Yes, internationally there were a growing series of issues, but when it came to money in the bank from what we do - i.e. feed the world – we were laughing.

He also kept telling us we were doing better than our trading partners, which at the time also wasn’t true: not of Australia, not of the states and certainly not of China.

Fast forward to Friday, he was busy trying to spin the 1000 people a day going onto the benefit heap as being not as bad as it looked given it represented only 1 % of the population as opposed to 10 % in America.

Without getting too picky, the jobless rate in America is up 30 million their population is 329 million so it’s not actually 10 per cent.

Anyway, finding people worse than you is not hard, and more importantly, it’s not a way to sell yourself and your agenda or plans.

America and their job programme is extremely loose around the edges. There is, compared to us, very little welfare, very little security, a lot of illegal workers, undocumented workers and workers on low wages topped up by tips. It’s a world away from us, so let’s drop the comparison.

What we are dealing with and what we can’t hide from, is that in April 1000 a week went on the dole. It’s an extraordinarily large number - a frightening number of people.

And we haven’t seen May. We haven’t seen the effect of level 3 with its heavy restrictions around hospitality. We already know tourism and hotels are shot.

The advantage Robertson has is we don’t blame him. The virus isn’t his fault. The level of carnage economically starts to encroach on the government’s handling of the lockdown, and on that they will have increasing trouble.

But spin is out. None of the 1000 per week cares what happened in Alabama, Illinois or California.

What they care about is what are the policies for growth, how close to our realistic debt ceiling are we, how long can the government keep bailing people out, how long before debt for businesses is no longer an option, how many defaults are coming, what’s happening to GDP what is their future.

Focus on that, focus on us. It’s a crisis, not a sales pitch.