Scott Morrison and now Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe have put genuine policy reform on the table as Australia goes into its biggest economic contraction since the 1930s Depression. If not during a crisis such as this, when would Australia break out of its national complacency and the quagmire of risk-averse, superficial and no-losers politics?

Political editor Phillip Coorey reports on Thursday that the Morrison government believes the policy change needs to be of the magnitude of the Hawke-Keating reforms from the mid-1980s, which opened up the protected and over-regulated Australian economy to global competition, reduced high income tax rates, privatised government enterprises and replaced centralised wage fixing with enterprise bargaining at the workplace.