Port workers can be sacked by text message and yet Bronwyn Bishop was "felled in the most unfair circumstances"? That's not right. There is a widening gulf between politicians and ordinary people that can no longer be ignored, writes Jeff Sparrow.

"If the culture is that employees can text message the boss and they in fact expect the boss to text message them, then that may be an appropriate methodology."

That was Senator Eric Abetz last Friday, defending Hutchison Ports' decision to send nearly 100 workers a midnight text explaining that they no longer had jobs.

It's a perfect illustration of why the public is entirely correct to maintain the outrage over politicians' entitlements.

Quite simply, the treatment our leaders expect as their due never gets extended to ordinary people.

None of the workers at Hutchison Ports hired helicopters for trips to Geelong. But the company wants to automate operations - and so its employees receive an insouciant text informing them they're out on their ears.

Still, at least the now-unemployed Hutchison staff could console themselves with Christopher Pyne's denunciation of their sacking. Oh, wait. Pyne wasn't upset about job losses on the waterfront. No, he was outraged about Bronwyn Bishop's newfound unemployment. She had, he said, been "felled in the most unfair circumstances".

A few days earlier, the same Christopher Pyne also complained that politicians faced a "Salem witch trial situation" over their entitlements. Yes, that's right. Back in 1692, villagers in colonial North America were tortured and executed because they charged taxpayers $5000 for flying their families to Sydney for a Christmas holiday. Oops. Wrong again. No, that was the Pyne clan - and they travelled by jumbo, not broomstick.

Of course, the ALP can scarcely complain about Liberal snouts in the trough, not with Tony Burke, for instance, asking taxpayers to foot the bill for his kids to fly (business class, of course) to a family holiday at Uluru. How did Orwell put it?

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

In recent days, we've heard some commentators complain that the outcry about such shenanigans is unfair, a distraction from the real issues.

They're quite wrong. Actually, it is the real issue.

In almost every industrialised nation today, we're seeing an extraordinary gulf opening up between those making political decisions, and those affected by them. The political class - not just politicians but that narrow strata of people deeply engaged in the political process - exempt themselves from the standards they impose upon others, particularly the most marginal and disempowered, who are treated as problems to be managed and monitored and disciplined.

Remember, Australian politicians are some of the best paid in the world. The base salary for a MP starts at $195,000 per annum, with Tony Abbott receiving (before entitlements) a salary of half a million each year (more than Barack Obama or David Cameron). On top of that, many parliamentarians are already independently wealthy: Joe Hockey, for instance, lives in a $6 million Sydney mansion, owns a beachside home in south Sydney, cattle properties in Queensland, and, when in Canberra, stays in a family property worth another $2 million. Indeed, in the midst of a housing affordability crisis, cabinet minsters own, on average, 2.55 properties each, while the shadow cabinet members owns 2.47.

That's the context for Jason Murphy's revelation in Crikey that, on top of their salaries, Australian politicians are spending a staggering half a billion dollars in entitlements each year. Yes, that's right. Half a billion dollars, each and every year.

To see the consequences of the social gulf between the political class and the rest of the country, you only have to turn from the discussion of parliamentary entitlements to the treatment of welfare recipients, a shift from matters affecting some of the nation's wealthiest people to its very poorest.

For some time now, the Government has been declaring war on so-called "welfare cheats", with Scott Morrison promising that, after his supposed success with boat turnbacks, he'll now "stop the bludgers". He says he's imposing a tough "welfare cop", and that he's "cracking down on those who want to game the system".

So far, there has been no serious push for Bishop or anyone else to face criminal investigation over their cavalier expenditure of vast sums of other people's money. Yet, when it comes to welfare, the reference to cops isn't purely rhetorical. Last year, remember, the Government appointed a senior police officer to investigate pensioners, those receiving disability support and on the Newstart allowance.

Or how about this?

A few days ago, we learned that the Abbott Government would roll out new "anti-fraud" measures for welfare recipients in Indigenous communities. In the wake of the Northern Territory Intervention, more than 20,000 people - most of them Indigenous - receive their welfare payments through the Basics Card, which prevents them spending money on certain items. The new scheme will, we're told, alert authorities to "disproportionate or odd behaviour" in card usage.

Barely a day goes by without new revelations about politicians' "disproportionate or odd behaviour" in respect of their entitlements. But could anyone imagine wealthy white people accepting the kind of paternalistic governance so casually legislated for the poor and Indigenous?

Let's remember that the Intervention left Indigenous people in "proscribed areas" subjected to measures endured by no one else in the nation, with bans on pornography and alcohol announced in huge and humiliating signs outside their communities. Problem drinkers and sex abusers exist in wealthy areas, too - but you're never going to see a huge banner outside Parliament announcing "no porn allowed here".

The Hutchison Ports dispute looks set to become a reprisal of the MUA confrontation from 1998 - up to and including a return of the balaclava-clad goons. If the stoush drags on, expect to see Government representatives explaining that Australia simply cannot afford to maintain the conditions workers have been accustomed to on the waterfront. What does that mean? Yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald interviewed a woman called Leyre Diaz, who explained that, before she received her late night dismissal, she thought she had a job for life.

That kind of "entitlement" - the simple expectation of decent treatment for working people - can be dissolved by text message.

It's in that context that the scandal engulfing parliament should be discussed.

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster, and an Honorary Fellow at Victoria University. His Twitter handle is @Jeff_Sparrow.