We are now "technically in recession"

apparently - and the Opposition is having a field day about the "mismanagement" of the economy.
Is it really that bad?
I was talking to a neighbour yesterday. She is a retired economist who once held a quite senior position in the public service. Her view is that things could be a lot worse than they are.  She feels the present government has actually done a good job balancing out keeping people as safe as possible and stimulating the economy.
I said "but a lot of people have lost their jobs and businesses have closed". Her response was,
    "Cat, some of those businesses were going to close anyway. The way things were they were not going to survive. This has just caused it to happen sooner rather than later."
I do not pretend to understand economics - apart from the very basics of "I have enough money to buy this but not that" and "if I want to save money then I need to spend less than I get".  
There have been times in my life when I was not getting any money. I watched my savings, such as they were, dwindle to almost nothing. I have never been homeless and I have always been able to think, "I can eat today" although I have sometimes wondered how long that would last. 
What I don't know is what it feels like to pour everything into a business you believe in only to lose everything. Two of the businesses in our shopping centre have closed for good. The manager of a third spoke to me yesterday - to thank me when I had picked up something that had fallen from a rack outside. We chatted for a moment and she said, "We aren't bringing in any stock for winter this year."  I know part of that is a supply problem  - most things in that shop would come from China - but I also wondered how much of it is a different problem. They seem to have had a "sale" of one sort or another for the entire year to date.
Even the manager of the supermarket has told me that, apart from the panic buying, the pattern has been different of late.  
My brother and his partner moved house last year - out of the city and into a much smaller country town. It is still close enough to the city to be accessible but the cost of living there is going to be less. Further still and they might have the additional costs of living in a rural area but this seems to be a nice balance between the two for lifestyle without the added expenses. The house is small and there is presently no space for a workshop. It has cost my brother almost $20,000 to date to get the necessary permissions to build a room on to the house to be used as one until it needs to be turned into another bedroom or a "granny flat". He can and will do the actual work himself with some help from his son-in-law who works in the industry. Unless he did that he simply could not afford to do it. 
The cost to my brother far exceeds the cost of providing what few services have been provided.  He expected this - although it has now exceeded even his down to earth expectations. Everything has gone up in price because of the twin disasters of the bush fires and now Covid19. More regulations have been brought in. There are different ways of doing things. He commented that they had budgeted for this and that not being able to take a planned holiday means they can afford the extra cost. In the end it will add value to their home. It's a calculated risk that will pay but, like me, he is watching businesses go to the wall and wondering what it is like to lose everything.
Looking at the empty shops yesterday though I was reminded of Mr Micawber,

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."