Hockey used his landmark speech to rail against the pernicious effect of the welfare safety net, which had been constructed by sleep-walking Western democracies using tax revenue collected from ordinary folk. Glen Le Lievre Voters had become so used to the state providing healthcare, education and a social safety net that they had come to (just imagine!) expect it, Hockey argued. Government spending on these "social programs" had reached "extraordinary" levels of GDP, and "people" had come to believe that they had a right to a good or service that someone else was paying for. Constituents were like children – as their Daddy/Treasurer, you needed to show them tough love.

A weak government gives its citizens everything they want, but "a strong government has the will to say 'No!'" Hockey lectured. It was a rewriting of the social contract in which one side (with apologies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau) was taking the piss. In government, this speech morphed into the Coalition policy expressed in the miserabilist budget of 2014, where unemployed people under 30 had to "wait" six months to receive the dole, hospital and university funding was cut and the Medicare co-payment was introduced. The pampered public howled with outrage – just as Hockey had predicted they would. The Abbott government tried manfully for the better part of a year to defend its measures, aided by the willing capital city tabloids, who were leaked "exclusives" about how much the Disability Support Pension was being "rorted" and how many dole recipients missed their job-search appointments (the latter story is still being rolled out, it appeared in Sydney's Daily Telegraph on Thursday).

The world was divided into lifters and leaners. The leaners believed the rules governing the lifters didn't apply to them. They believed they could take without giving back. They believed they could operate outside the law. Reading the Panama Papers this week – the astonishingly large cache of documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm that specialises in building offshore havens where the super-rich can hide their money from the taxman – it was hard not to think of Joe. What would he make of this astonishing display of entitlement? What would he tell us about the super-yacht crowd, the international uber-rich who belong to no country, who reject their homelands in favour of "domiciles" where they can hide and obfuscate their true worth? These people are not so much state-less as they are state-free. They float above and beyond us, tethered to no government, and no law. OK, sure they might seek to minimise their income for tax reasons, but at least they pay their own way, right? They don't leach off government services. They made their money through hard graft.

Except that no one gets that rich without the substantial aid, or in cases of outright corruption, the gift, of public assets – be they land, contracts or the use of infrastructure built by the taxpayer. The super-rich might not be availing themselves of bulk-billing GPs, but they still use airports and roads, hospitals and universities. And what would the entitlement-busters make of the behaviour of the big banks, who have been accused of mistreating and mischarging customers for years? The very same banks who have availed themselves of hefty billions of taxpayer financial support during the Global Financial Crisis? This week, Westpac was accused by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission of rorting the interbank interest rate market. In a speech to a Westpac lunch on Wednesday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gave the banks a whack, saying there had been "too many troubling incidents over recent times".

But it was rhetoric hard to square with the apparent wish of the Prime Minister to deliver a corporate tax cut at the next election. It was also hard to square with the Coalition's previous attempt to reverse controls on the financial sector brought in by the Gillard Labor government. The Coalition was rolled in the Senate on that, but its loyalties were made clear. Labor has signalled a royal commission into banks should it win government, and Turnbull will find it increasingly hard to argue a royal commission into union corruption is many miles more necessary and relevant to a cross-section of Australians than a banking inquiry of some stripe. Of course, the chief combatant in the jihad on entitlement was former social services minister Kevin Andrews. Andrews was demoted under Turnbull's leadership, and has spent his time since sniping from the backbench and leaking on behalf of those dubbed the "Del-Cons", the Coalition backbenchers who are delusional enough to think Tony Abbott will one day regain the leadership. This week, Andrews gave an interview saying he would be "prepared" to challenge Turnbull for the leadership if the right circumstances called for it.

What noblesse oblige. His remarks are only the latest in a series of comments from Abbott supporters, which betray their strong conviction that they deserve power. Despite Joe Hockey's best efforts, the age of entitlement is far from over. It's alive and close to home.