When my granddad was a boy, you could get a home loan, order furniture, or buy a side of meat at a store run by the state government (of, forgive me, Queensland).

When my dad was growing up, government actually guaranteed everyone a job. At least, every man. In the shadow of fascism and communism, both Labor and conservative governments were willing to go to almost any lengths to mitigate the perceived threat of mass (male) unemployment.

Idle hands, you see, are the devil's playthings, or worse, Lenin's.

READ MORE:

In return we basically trusted government. We argued about a lot, but at the end of the day Australians agreed - the way to change the country was to change the government, as Paul Keating put it.

That trust had already been breaking down before COVID-19, though more on that later. But I think there's a risk the virus crisis could be the final nail in the coffin of majority government in this country.

Last week, we learned that over one million Australians are measured as unemployed. The jobless figure ticked over into seven digits, seasonally adjusted, in the Australian Bureau of Statistics' July figures.

Want more local news? Subscribe to the Leader to read it here first

COVID-19 has officially given us the most joblessness since the Great Depression.

According to new ABS data the 600,000 people the virus has made unemployed were disproportionately our country's lowest-paid employees. (In a weird statistical anomaly, this has driven an increase in average hourly income, though wage growth is stagnant).

In a way that is a good thing. Hopefully business will be more willing to quickly rehire the nation's cheapest employees.

In another way we've slugged people who were already struggling with yet another financial blow. The nation's least stable have again suffered disproportionately from a crisis not of their control.

And they're getting angrier and angrier each time this happens. Maybe this final injury after years of insult, denial of housing, experience of a failed and even fraudulent Centrelink income support system, wage stagnation, service cuts and above all uncertainty this blow will be the last straw.

But I think it's also worth thinking about the long-term affect this could have.

Economists usually talk about the long-term impact of unemployment in terms of productivity. A productive person who has been unemployed for a long time will be relatively less skilled, less confident, even less mentally or physically healthy, and therefore will work less efficiently.

But I worry about another cost as well: political radicalism.

Support the local news that keeps you informed - subscribe today.

Australians were already pretty contemptuous of their governments even before the COVID-19 crisis. The Australian Election Study shows our 'trust in government' plummeted from 52 per cent in 1969 to just 25 per cent last year, the lowest number ever recorded. And the further you go from a capital city, the less trust in government you will find.

We're voting less consistently than we ever have. Where once 72 per cent of us told the AES they 'always' voted for the same party, today just 39 per cent do.

As a result, our parliaments are changing - though not as much as we'd like. Over 95 per cent of the seats in the lower house of Federal parliament are held by the major two parties. Just three-quarters of us voted for them.

One interpretation: angry people are voting for change and then not getting it. Because of our single-member-electorate system, that means governments are relying more and more on the preferences of third-party voters. That is, we're becoming more and more likely to elect parties we hate the least, rather than making an affirmative choice for a platform we prefer.

Have your say, send a letter to the editor.

Politicians have noticed this. Negative campaigns are more negative and personal - and dishonest - than they ever have been, at least on my TV and in my letterbox.

So here's my concern. Could the COVID-19 crisis accelerate this race to the bottom? Could we have government defined not by how to help people but by which figure of hate is less despised? Humans are deeply not good at being jobless. We need the material things work brings, of course, but employment also gives us identity.

Unemployment also has a negative psychic and physical affect not just on mum and dad but the kids, the neighbours, local business, the suburb, the town, the state and ultimately Australians. Mass unemployment multiplies that.

That sort of mass directionless misery is a powerful political tool. In the hands of the less-scrupulous it can be a dangerous one.

Historically the Great Depression was a time of political extremism even in Australia, with both communist and fascist groups active. NSW premier Jack Lang was sacked by the state's governor; tensions were high.

It seems to me unemployment rates unseen since the Great Depression could create the same sort of political polarisation and radicalism today. Modern social media has already proven a very effective weapon for recruiting young, angry men in the hands of groups we now call the alt-right. One of them machine-gunned a group of New Zealand Muslims last year.

My opinion is that we should have the same fear of mass joblessness - male and, this time, female - that our parents did. It's only prudent. After this virus is beaten let's get government spending again, and let's get people working again.