As a parable of avarice, it is surely much older than the internet that has recently given it a new lease of life. It is so simple that it can be communicated in less than 140 characters, and if the details may have changed down the centuries and from culture to culture, the basic story remains the same: a rich man, a worker and a poor man are sitting around a table. On the table are 12 biscuits. The rich man takes 11 of the biscuits, and says to the worker: “that poor man wants your biscuit.”

In her pugnacious attack on the recipients of state welfare, mining heiress Gina Rinehart has outed herself as the villain of this piece of twitter-friendly agit prop. Not content with being the richest individual in Australia, she seeks to create division between her fellow citizens and the most vulnerable in society whom she accuses as having an “entitlement mentality” towards government welfare.

Never mind that, like most super-rich entrepreneurs, she feels entitled to subsidies and infrastructure investment funded by the Australia tax-payer to prop up her business empire. She demands that the government put out a “welcome mat” to big corporations, cutting business taxes, dumping regulations and removing the need to gain approval for projects. With an agenda like that, there is no surprise that the medicine that Rinehart prescribes for Australia is “a healthy dose of Thatcherism.”

Australians curious as to what effect such policies might have on society need to look no further than the Tory-led coalition currently seeking to reform welfare payments in the UK.

Under the new hard line taken by the department of work and pensions, almost a million people have faced benefit sanctions in the past year, the highest number since the Job Seekers Allowance – what we used to call the dole – was introduced in 1996. As a result, one charity food bank in Newcastle has seen those seeking help leap from 30 people a week to 1,600 in less than a year.

The latest sign of how desperate things have become is the introduction of “kettle boxes” for food bank clients who cannot afford to switch on their cooker to boil pasta or rice. For the even more destitute, a “cold box” food parcel has been developed, containing tinned groceries that can be prepared without need for heating or hot water.

No doubt Rinehart will find some satisfaction that, thanks to policies initiated by her heroine and implemented by her heirs, some Britons – many with young children to feed - are now facing a daily choice between heating and eating.

Australians attracted to Thatcherism should reflect on how the Iron Lady’s career ended. She wasn’t thrown out of office by the British electorate – it was her own party that stabbed her in the back.

Her cabinet colleagues eventually come to the same conclusion that many of us had reached years before: Thatcher was a divisive figure, seeking to make scapegoats of the most vulnerable in society, while caring nothing for the consequences. In her determination to follow in her footsteps, Rinehart takes the biscuits.

• This article was amended on 12 March to correct two minor typographical errors.