Nearly 25 years ago, when I became the minister responsible for the ABC, I had to bludgeon it into taking economics seriously. It was happy to provide wall-to-wall political coverage but economics was a no-go area – it simply wasn’t interested.

Since then little has changed – as the pandemic has graphically illustrated. It is simply incomprehensible that, in the depths of the COVID-19 crisis, its so-called principal economics correspondent, Emma Alberici, was urging people to “stop talking about the economy”, as though it was some abstract concept, rather than the lifeblood of the nation.