The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison is, at the very least, a man one could never accuse of a fresh idea. This week, he’s wandered out to the ol’ conservative graveyard with his policy shovel again, trying to resurrect the somewhat wormy corpse of a plan to drug test welfare recipients.

No one should be surprised that the Liberals are desperate for a bit of Grand Guignol theatrics to distract the masses. After scraping back into government on the insistent myth of their superior economic management, the Liberals share in our national misfortune of being forced to live with its results.

It was this week we learned that six years of the Liberals have just delivered Australia its worst financial year since the recession of 1990-91. And that on top of “miserable” productivity growth and rising unemployment, the culmination of the ongoing policy disaster in the Murray-Darling is that crops are failing and farmers are warning the price of our food will go up.

Of course the government have dug out the props and costumes to stage a culture war. One wonders if the unemployed were picked as villains because the Sri Lankan family from Biloela reminded everyone too much of their favourite neighbours for a “be scared of refugees” theme to work. Not to mention there’s no dramatic irony quite as powerful as punishing your victims for the proof they provide of your cruelty.

But what is surprising – for some – is the Liberals choosing to revive this particular ghastly play. It was the Abbott iteration of this same government that mooted drug tests for welfare recipients in 2014. Condemned by medical experts, addiction specialists and the evidence of the policy’s disastrous failure in both Florida and New Zealand, Australians were treated to the sight of Kevin Andrews being informed that Abbott had dropped the policy during the very ABC live interview into which he’d been sent to defend it.

My message to those shocked by the event is that they really should know by now that this is a government that never met a mistake they couldn’t make twice.

This being said, I’ll admit that Morrison’s pursuit of drug-testing surprised me. Not because I don’t think he’s a calcified, uncaring relic who mouths crudely cribbed biblical conservatism in lieu of both policy depth and a human conscience, delivering a prime ministerial performance that to date amounts to little more than impersonating John Howard at an interminable political improv night – because I do, he is, he does and it probably always will. It’s that – as the New Zealand experiment revealed – for the statistically very small number of welfare recipients who do use drugs, smoking cannabis is fiscally responsible fun ... and I thought he’d admire its Protestant thrift.

Consistency of virtue, of course, is not a defining characteristic of Morrison, who prays to baby Jesus in a manger as he personally dispatches helpless kids to Christmas Island, just as it isn’t of the “free speech” crowd around him who painted Israel Folau as a martyr while they remain silent on the union delegate ratted out then fired for sharing a Downfall meme in a group chat.

It’s those people who will spruik this stupid policy without imagining, for even one second, what life is like on $489.70 a fortnight (or around $35 per day), who are the danger here. Leaving aside that Morrison and his comrades get more than twice as much a day just as a meal allowance when they visit Canberra, the precise distance of certain Liberal party cheerleaders from the lived economy of Australians on welfare can be measured in the insistence of the “new” bill’s advocates that cocaine be added to the testing remit. Politely, I suggest that anyone who believes one can sustain a coke habit in Australia on an income of less than $300 a week is so far removed from a knowledge of how maths works that they should never be let near a costings paper again. Either that, or they’re subject to a wilful optimism so powerful it could only be chemical.

Perhaps when one is broke on Newstart, failing to get a job and trapped in one’s home on an income that doesn’t afford luxuries as indulgently costly as going to a movie, dinner with friends or drinks, bargain pleasures – like small amounts of a drug that’s relatively cheap to buy, easy to grow and lasts for a few hours – might just be a cost-effective alternative entertainment.

I say this as a person whose loathing of drugs is a matter of record, but who maintains a passionate, lifelong habit of observing reality. Morrison’s party of government arguably has an infamous internal drinking culture, recording broken parliamentary tables, questionable conduct of a sexual nature and insults to foreign dignitaries in its expression. It is churlish to punish those whose chemical behaviours have zero sovereign repercussions just because they are cheaper.

If such people wish to discourage drug consumption among a small number of welfare recipients, there’s an easy way to perform virtue, and that’s to join the growing demand for raising the rate of Newstart.

Otherwise, participating in this nonsense is sound and fury on a stage, a convenient prop to a government that doesn’t want anyone to follow the plot too closely.

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist