“It was heartbreaking stuff yesterday Alan.”

“Alan”, naturally, is Alan Jones and our heartbreak town crier is Stuart Robert – the minister charged with rolling out government support to Australians knocked sideways courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Decent people,” Robert informed “Alan” on Tuesday morning (as if this might be news to anyone), had found themselves “very quickly in very difficult circumstances” because governments had imposed lockdowns on venues that employ many thousands of people to try and contain community transmissions of Covid-19.

It’s unusual for the opening sentence of a radio interview by a government minister to serve as giant billboard for why the minister in question should be cleaning out his desk to spend more time with his family – but we, as everyone says 24/7, are in unusual times.

So here was the first clue, at least in this particular interview, that Australia’s minister for government services is a bloody idiot.

If you are in the middle of a pandemic that threatens lives and potentially puts millions of people out of work, now is not the time to indulge yourself with a reflection (that no one asked for) on the deserving and undeserving poor.

Yet the opening gambit of the conversation on Tuesday morning was a clear inference that the people who normally turn up at government offices looking for help are not decent people.

Service delivery at all times requires empathy, and empathy is particularly necessary during a crisis of the scale Australia and the world is currently facing.

If you can’t keep your prejudices to yourself, if you can’t curb your own colossal ignorance, if you can’t avoid the temptation of winking knowingly to Alan Jones (who took up the decency cue with alacrity, noting the current visitors to Centrelink were first-timers, “independent all their lives”), you really need to do Australia a favour and accelerate your own social isolation and disconnect all communications devices.

After the gratuitous touchdown on the deserving and the non-deserving poor, the hapless minister for (allegedly) helping (deserving) people then set about demonstrating his monumental managerial incompetence to the country.

Robert told “Alan” the MyGov website normally had 6,000 visits on a typical Monday morning. But at 9.40am there were massive spikes in traffic, with 98,000 concurrent requests.

People queue along Crown Street in Sydney’s Darlinghurst on Monday to get into the Centrelink office. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Given lockdowns had just cost people their jobs, a run on the MyGov website could have been predicted. But the surge on the system set off alarms, so officials set about investigating.

While the officials were seeking facts, Robert thought it was a good idea to keep talking.

He told reporters early on Monday there had been a cyber-attack on the government website, promptly fanning the national anxiety that had been spreading since the chaos of Sunday night, where the levels of the government struggled to be clear about whether schools would be operating, and precisely which services would be shut down to contain the spread of the virus.

But by question time on Monday, Robert had a completely different story. There was no cyber attack. The website just got overwhelmed by the terrified people who governments, state and federal, had just put out of work to try and save lives.

Robert told “Alan” on Tuesday morning that perhaps, on reflection, possibly, (it wasn’t entirely clear), he should have conducted himself differently.

“I probably should have waited for the investigation before jumping the gun,” the minister said.

“Well, yes, you fool,” would have been a reasonable riposte from a shock jock who normally doesn’t bother to count to 10 before ripping a guest’s head off for a bit of breakfast sport. But “Alan”, saint that he is, bestowed his forgiveness on Stuart, who apparently has a very tough gig.

One could observe somewhat caustically that at least Robert still has a gig, although based on his present performance, it is entirely unclear why.

But we need to press on with this story, because the minister persisted in being bewildered at taxpayer expense.

Robert told “Alan” he’d prepared over the weekend for traffic on the site to increase from 6,000 to 55,000 visits. “I didn’t think I’d have to prepare for 100,000 concurrent users,” Robert said.

“My bad for not realising the sheer scale of the decision on Sunday night by the national leaders that literally saw hundreds and hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, unemployed overnight.”

My bad? My bad? Really? That’s all you’ve got?

My bad suggests this minister has no grasp of the gravity of the current circumstances. He seems to have little grasp of how the systems he administers actually work. The facts he recounted to Jones are strongly suggestive of arms of government not talking to other arms of government. How do you impose a lockdown on Sunday night that puts (as Robert acknowledged) a million people out of work and then estimate only 50-odd thousand will flood MyGov on Monday morning? How do you not comprehend that many Australian workers, particularly in casual gigs, are living hand-to-mouth and need help now, not in a month?

I mean there are no words that can capture this gormlessness adequately, as many of the desperate people currently queueing outside Centrelink offices can certainly tell you.

People who have no work and who are struggling to access the Centrelink system can tell you from lived experience over the past 48 hours that governments seem to be efficient at imposing lockdowns, but so far, the efficiency doesn’t extend to a rapid rollout of safety nets.

Yes, this is hard. Yes, things moved with rapid speed on Sunday night. Yes, everyone is doing their best. But let’s be blunt. Ministers with important jobs do not have the luxury of being idiots right now.

No one has that luxury.

Just a bit of free advice: if you happen to be an idiot periodically, because you are human, and you are overrun in extraordinary circumstances, then contrition is best. It’s best to say, I’m terribly sorry, I was an idiot, and I intend to work day and night to not be an idiot again.

Just in case it is not already clear, Australians right now are looking for clear messages and a way to sustain themselves in deeply uncertain times. They are looking for people in authority to remain calm and not spout the first bit of random nonsense that comes into their head.

Our latest polling suggests a substantial proportion of people don’t trust the government or the media to tell them the truth about this virus. Given there is a substantial trust deficit, making sure what comes out of your mouth is accurate is extremely important. We all bear that responsibility.

If you can’t be accurate, then do us a favour and hand over to someone who can.