Australians like to import cultural habits from overseas. When I was in primary school, dressing like East 17 and following the Charlotte Hornets was the height of fashion. Our politicians aren’t immune to foreign trends either – I don’t remember the “debt ceiling” ever being mentioned in Australian politics before Barnaby Joyce picked up on the Tea Party’s rhetoric and imported it to Canberra.

The latest imported fad is the war on the welfare state, which the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, launched in London a little over a year ago in his speech on “the end of the age of entitlement”. He recently reiterated his central point, warning that a Coalition government would implement drastic welfare and spending cuts. He’s not alone: the CIS, a major conservative thinktank, recently launched a campaign to slash government spending.

This radical war on welfare seems to rest on a couple of simple premises. The first is that social spending has risen rapidly, and is now too high. The second is the idea that too much of our spending goes to people who don’t need it, and that this “middle-class welfare” has risen significantly over time.

Neither of these claims holds up to scrutiny.

Statistics from the OECD show that Australia spent 8.1% of its national income on cash benefits last year, compared with an average of 12.6% across the advanced economies. Only South Korea (3.7%) and Iceland (6.8%) spent less. The US is no one’s idea of a generous welfare state, but we’d need to spend around $60bn extra on welfare each year to match its spending as a proportion of GDP. Even in 2005, before the financial crisis sent its unemployment rate soaring, America’s spending on cash benefits was a little higher than ours as a share of the economy.

Our welfare spending is low, and it also hasn’t grown that much over the past couple of decades. In the mid-2000s, we devoted about 8% of GDP to cash benefits, the same as we do now. In the mid 1990s, when unemployment was much higher, we spent 9% of GDP.

Strike one against the war on welfare.

A big part of the reason our spending is so low, relative to other advanced economies, is that we target our spending much more towards those who need it. If you want to get family payments, or the age pension, or unemployment benefits, you’ll need to tell the government what you earn. If you earn too much, you don’t get the payment. These means tests in Australia are much tighter than they are elsewhere, so a larger share of our spending goes to low-income households. In most other advanced economies, the welfare system has a much bigger “contributory” element – what you get out is related to what you put in – so higher-income earners actually end up with higher payments if they become unemployed, for example.

The latest ABS figures, for 2009-10, show that the poorest 20% of Australian households received an average of $323 a week in cash benefits, while the richest received just $22 per week, a ratio of $14.7 to a poor household for every dollar that goes to the richest. Peter Whiteford from the ANU has shown that a far larger proportion of our cash benefits go to the poorest households than in any other advanced economy. Not only do rich Australians receive a tiny share of welfare spending, but their share is smaller than it used to be back in the 1980s and early 1990s. The idea that Australia is a land of rampant middle- and upper-class welfare is a myth.

Strike two against the war on welfare.

Hockey has warned darkly that “western democracies ... have been reluctant to wind back universal access to payments”. Maybe this is the sort of thing that goes over well at the UK Institute of Economic Affairs, where Hockey delivered his speech, but it doesn’t really translate to Australia. Now that the government has scrapped the baby bonus and means-tested family tax benefit part B and the private health insurance rebate, Luke Buckmaster of the Parliamentary Library could only find one “significant payment not currently means-tested”, which is the $2bn a year Child Care Rebate. If the war on welfare is all about introducing means tests, it’s already been won in Australia.

Where we do have “middle-class welfare” is in the tax breaks that mostly benefit the rich. Concessions for superannuation are skewed towards upper-income households, and the wealthy also benefit disproportionately from tax breaks on things like negatively geared property and capital gains. But I don’t think this is what Hockey and his fellow warriors against welfare have in mind when they mutter ominously about unsustainable policies.

When rumours were flying around earlier this year that the government might reduce some of the tax concessions that high-income households receive for superannuation, they were accused of class warfare, including by some disgruntled Labor figures. The same tedious accusation is made whenever talk turns to reducing public support for things such as private health insurance – the people who usually bleat about out-of-control spending splutter with outrage.

If future governments find we’re not raising enough revenue to fund our social spending, the obvious solution is to raise more revenue. We’re one of the lowest taxing countries in the developed world. There’s no need to gut our social protection system to balance the books. Some fads, like East 17’s hats, are best left in Britain.