At least we know the Turnbull government's pursuit of millions of dollars in Centrelink debt from thousands of punters who don't actually owe them a brass razoo isn't just a grotesque indulgence. Turns out the government needs that money to prop up Queensland's real estate industry and apartment construction sector.

After all, the money Christian Porter is chasing from former welfare recipients he still insists have been overpaid, is the same money that Sussan Ley spent catching flights and riding around in government limos when she accidentally bought her Gold Coast apartment. It's public money.

Your money, in other words.

This is the really sickening aspect of this business; the egregious hypocrisy. Here is a government that launched a ham-fisted assault on thousands of innocent people, a government that unleashed debt collectors and standover merchants on the sick, the mentally ill, the poor and disadvantaged, wrongly in many cases, and with reckless indifference to the consequences.