"Large businesses, in particular, have a huge role to play," the Prime Minister told Tuesday's AFR Business Summit. "Whatever you thought 2020 was going to be about, think again... We need your common sense... But we need your patriotism as well. We need you to support your workers by keeping them employed".

These are fine sentiments but we have to ask if it is possible Mr Morrison has naively overestimated the willingness of the big end of town to accept self-inflicted pain in order to ensure we can all move forward together? A lot of people are going to say so.

Union leaders have already flagged their scepticism about the prospect of employers coughing up for sick leave and other entitlements they are not legally obliged to provide.

The shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has dismissed the PM's appeal, for corporations to pay suppliers promptly to help them stay afloat, as a chimera given such delays have existed for so long they seem to be a part of the national business model.

So who is right? The Prime Minister who wants corporate Australia to step up and be the best it can be, or the cynics who would argue our business leaders are the captives of profit-hungry shareholders and can only be judged on what they have done before?

It's probably going to turn out to be both.

Yes, there will be captains of industry who will take some of the billions of taxpayer dollars on offer and use it to further their own restructuring and cost cutting agendas.

We saw the big banks do that with incentives intended to encourage innovation and underwrite worker security back in 2016 and 2017.

But, on the other hand, when the Prime Minister put those same banks on the spot last week by pleading with them to pass the Reserve Bank's interest cut on in full, they did so for the first time in years.

This came on the back of the magnificent effort by Qantas in helping with the return to Australia of citizens stranded abroad by the coronavirus.

The company followed this up with Tuesday's announcement by Alan Joyce he would not be taking a salary for the rest of the financial year and that senior executives would take a major pay cut as well.

Qantas was almost immediately rewarded for this, and its commitment to keep as many staff in work as possible, with a bounce in its share price.

It is becoming apparent this crisis is not only worse than people, including governments, initially thought; but that it is going to be worse than most pundits thought possible.

And yet, as Mr Morrison pointed out repeatedly on Tuesday, it will pass. The global economy will recover and we will come out the other side.

This emergency has much more in common with a national crisis such as World War II than with a prolonged collapse such as the Great Depression.

It is now more than 70 years since our "greatest generation" rallied heroically to defend our shores and our way of life. Everybody, from the then managing director of BHP, Essington Lewis, to the humblest farm labourer, pitched in to do their bit.

The PM seems to be betting the farm on the hope the spirit of national unity that carried us through those dark days still exists and that "team Australia" will prevail. Is it too much to hope he might be right?