The other night I woke from a nightmare. In the nightmare, I was in a car crash in a Comcar, the white chauffeured cars used by federal politicians. There was a car coming towards us, passing another car on a corner on the crest of a hill on double lines.

We smashed into both cars but rather than stopping at the crash scene my driver reversed and sped from the accident while being chased by a screaming man in another car. My driver hid our car behind a hedge in a hospital car park. Nearby were drug-addict patients smoking on the lawn. I sat beside my driver imploring him to return to the scene as terrible as that would be.

There has to be a limit to the economic toilet paper countries put in their trolleys. Janie Barrett

I analyse my dreams, especially when they wake me up at 2am. I think the cause of this dream was that something not our fault, COVID-19, is now going to cause us massive new problems.

Anything that is borrowed must be repaid and with interest. The global stimulus packages are going to take many nations to debt levels far beyond their control. And when is debt beyond one's control? When it is unable to be paid down.

When the world is confronted by catastrophic problems it must manage them with what resources it has knowing there is a finite limit to those resources.

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, most interviews on television are done now by Skype. The networks have not shutdown. They have managed around the problem. They use the technology they have and work online. They are working within the limits of their resources. They don’t bring people to the studio because it is against the proper edicts to manage the disease and as well the cost and risk associated with disease control mechanisms within the studio would be massive. They don’t close because if they did their engagement with the people would be lost and they would not regain it or it would at the least be severely compromised.

To understand any request made of government is to first understand that governments have no money but yours and anything they borrow you have borrowed and anything they must repay must be paid by you. The question to ask yourself is: would you have borrowed the money for that request if it was solely your decision? Governments are also responsible for the fundamental worth of that money so that the money you have in the bank is not in a currency of no worth.

Around the world some countries have been devastated by COVID-19 but some countries have not. In some parts of the world, the financial fallout will be as economically disastrous as the disease was for the health of its people. Shops will go broke, major employers will go broke, major exporters will be lost and the financial weight bearing walls of the country’s economic house will collapse. Their currencies will be debased.

If we lose a less vital section of our economy, we can reboot it after the disease has passed. Similarly, if you lose iron off your roof in a storm or a window you can replace it. But if you lose the wall that holds the roof up then the house is lost.

In March, the Prime Minister announced a further stimulus package that would be "even bigger than anything you have so far seen".

In an economy, the weight bearing walls are your major exporting sectors, your vital service sectors such as schools, hospitals and banks as well as the capacity of the government and the trust of the people in it. If these are maintained then the undoubted damage to other sectors of the economy can be repaired over time.

The world's nations have to manage COVID-19 in such a way that after the storm they each have an economy, a house. They must also be in a position to rebuild prudently with the resources that the house can afford and repay the extra money borrowed for the repairs.

During this pandemic there have been many unknowns but there are also some constant epidemiological and economic realities that will govern these events. They are what the world must be fastidious in understanding. No economy including ours can afford to buy all the economic toilet paper in the supermarket. It might discover it has spent money needlessly, in a way that is not effective in dealing with an economic crisis.

Barnaby Joyce is the federal member for New England.