This week we began to discover just how badly the coronavirus is hitting jobs, and also just how little change there is in thinking about how the economy should be structured in the future.

The Bureau of Statistics this week released new data which showed the week-by-week impact on the coronavirus on jobs. It was quite horrific – the hospitality sector was reduced by a quarter, and overall there were 6% fewer Australian with a job in the first week of April compared to a month earlier.

Even if we assume that is the full impact this month (which is optimistic), such a fall is utterly unprecedented.

It is roughly equivalent to the amount of jobs lost during the 1990s recession. But whereas that occurred over 30 months, this took just one.

The problem of course is that as a rule it takes longer to recover the jobs than it does to lose them. And so we see the government, economists and (to paraphrase Paul Keating) every pet-shop galah talking about what is needed to get the economy moving again.

The obvious point is that until the health situation returns to some level of normalcy, all talk of snapping back is just pabulum.

But that aside, what is clear is that any thought that we’re about to see a kumbaya moment of coming together of opposing views on the economy is completely gone.

The coronavirus may have seen the government engage in the largest economic spending in history but do not expect it to remain of the view that a large government is needed.

This week the head of the RBA, Philip Lowe, gave a speech which was variously reported and commented on by the prime minister and treasurer as being a sort of a game changer.

Scott Morrison suggested the speech showed “it’s not business as usual”.

Yet governor Lowe’s speech was hardly revelatory – the things he was calling for are things he has long been calling for. The Reserve Bank has also spent the better part of three years calling for more fiscal stimulus from the government, which was studiously ignored, and yet now apparently the RBA needs to be listened to with intent.

And when we look at the things Morrisons listed as being needed, we see he is actually talking about business as usual: “It’s about the federal government and the state governments working together in a whole field of areas from tax to industrial relations to infrastructure to skills and, of course, to cutting red tape and deregulation”.

Morrison and Frydenberg both spoke of productivity and referenced the Productivity Commission’s “Shifting the Dial” report issued in 2017 as needing to be revisited.

But it’s business as usual when it comes to the government dismissing policy ideas it disagrees with, such as putting a price on carbon, and promoting things it does agree with, such as cutting red tape, as necessary “reform”.

Indeed we’ve already seen this week the government looking to reduce environmental regulations.

It is worth nothing that economists do not agree on what will improve productivity and when politicians say “reform” they mostly mean “policy I am in favour of”.

Stephen Kirchner, for example, says we need to encourage foreign investment flows and migration as well as a reduction of regulations, while John Quiggin argues that the impact of “microeconomic reform” such as industrial relations “has been, and is likely to remain, marginal”. He argues instead we need technology growth and a better skilled workforce.

We should also note that the Productivity Commission itself, when looking at industrial relations in 2015, noted that “there is little robust evidence that the different variants of [workplace relations] systems over the last 20 years have had detectable effects on measured economy-wide productivity”.

The job losses are going to be dire, but don’t let the crisis blind you to thinking any “reform” is needed. While the government hopes to keep its stimulus spending (including the doubling of dole payments) to the short term, any changes to industrial relations and taxation – for good or ill – will be here for the long-term.

• Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia