The government’s horrific start to the year is not only fully deserved, it is completely appropriate. The Centrelink shemozzle and entitlements abuses are a wonderful amalgam of the absence of respect for those on welfare and the tin-eared political nous which characterises this government.

Let’s not pretend that Centrelink issuing faulty debt notices is just a case of IT gone wrong.

Faults where people are issued debt notices of $14,000 due to the system incorrectly duplicating employers, or because it hamfistedly averages annual income over 52 weeks are not really IT glitches, but rather are part of the policy design.

Such faults are implicit in a data matching system designed notionally to catch fraud, but which is used instead to raise revenue by targeting over-payments that occurred due to honest mistakes.

Data matching is actually a rather sensible tool for governments to use. But there is a world of difference between using it to better discover cases of fraud, and to discover instances where, for example, a person was overpaid $54 four years ago because he received the dole for one day longer than he was supposed to.

The system is not designed to be so precise, and the government clearly knew this before the mass of complaints began occurring late December and into this new year.

You can use data matching to precisely “catch” that $54 overpayment, but it requires human involvement – the paying of public servants to go into sharper detail than the obtuse data-matching system. But that can cost the government more in labour than is recovered when dealing with such small amounts.

If raising revenue is the only concern, the key is to make the system as cheap as possible, and thus you remove the “costly” humans and make it automated. But you would only do this if your desire for revenue outweighed your respect of the people who you know will receive erroneous (and dare one suggest, fraudulent) debt notices.

And we know the government has no respect for those on welfare.

And we know the government has no respect for those on welfare.

Social services minister Christian Porter was so determined to have people believe that those on welfare are over-paid and lazy he spent last year putting out absurd figures that attempted to convince voters the welfare system was either being rorted or was too generous – such as when he suggested a single mum with four kids was better off on welfare than if she had a job.

So when you hear Porter argue that the automated system is “about as reasonable a process as you could possibly derive”, you need to understand that “reasonable” in his mind includes spouting nonsense designed to vilify some of the poorest in our society.

Little wonder that this fetid government happily signed off on this mail scam of a program – after all there’s revenue to be gained, in this case, $2.1bn over four years.

Human services minister Alan Tudge highlights the primacy of the system as a revenue gathering exercise when he claimed this week it has recovered $300m since July, despite that figure only being the amount of debt “identified”.

Given the many instances of erroneously identified debts that have come to light in the past two weeks, questions surely need to be asked about how solid is the $2.1bn revenue figure.

Rather nicely, the Centrelink debt scam has also folded into the entitlements scandal, with Tudge suggesting that of the abuses of political entitlements there was no malevolent intent. He argued that “I don’t think, in relation to some of the examples that I have seen in recent times, that people have deliberately sought to defraud the system.”

It’s a pretty generous assessment from the man who last year told Channel 9’s A Current Affair of those who owed a Centrelink debt that “we’ll find you, we’ll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison.”

So a minister claiming $13,000 in charter flights between capital cites gets the benefit of the doubt, but welfare recipients are left to prove their innocence while being threatened with jail and forced to pay back the debt even while the amount is in dispute.

The entitlements scandal, which has seen health minister Sussan Ley resign, is also fully deserved. The government had plenty of opportunity fix the current system which allows politicians to claim expenses for the flimsiest of reasons.

The government failed to act on the recommendations of a review into entitlements after the Brownyn Bishop “choppergate” scandal, despite it being one of the issues which annoyed voters the most.

A government with any understanding of the political mood of the electorate would have known ignoring the report would come back to bite them, and bite them hard. But given you have government ministers such as Steven Ciobo suggesting voters “expect” politicians to claim travel entitlements to attend sporting events, understanding the political mood would not seem to be one of the government’s strengths.

That it took this scandal for the prime minister to announce he will implement the recommendations of the review and also introduce an independent authority suggests he is a leader very good at closing the door after the horse has bolted.

That the latest scandal also involves a minister using a Comcar to buy a $795,000 investment property only makes it more deserved given the Turnbull government has fought against any measures to water down negative gearing and attack housing affordability.

Having a minister claim entitlements while buying an investment property is probably the best example of an out of touch government as you could imagine. About the only better example would be a minister claiming entitlements to attend a polo event. But that would just be too much of a caricature to believe.

Oh hello, Julie Bishop.

There is however one silver lining for the government on this whole awful start to the year. Normally a government would be caught off guard by a having senior minister resign. Fortunately this government has Arthur Sinodinos, who already has experience of standing aside from a ministerial role during the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s investigation into Australian Water Holdings , ready to step in and take over Ley’s role.

Experience matters at such times.