Every now and again, Joe Hockey stands up and says something so completely correct that his colleagues automatically want to track him down and thump him.

Like in February last year, when – amid an ugly controversy over whether taxpayers should pay for asylum seekers to bury their dead from the Christmas Island tragedy – Mr Hockey shamed his colleagues with a dignified handful of words: "I would never seek to deny a parent or child from saying goodbye to their relative."

Or when he shut down, later last year, Coalition enthusiasm for forcing Craig Thomson to remain in Parliament when his wife was due: "We're not going to deny the right of a person to be at the birth of their child."

This time, though, Joe's really done it. And he knows he's really done it, because he went to London to say it.

What he went to London to say was that our democracy has become addicted to entitlement, and that this state of affairs is no longer sustainable.

The entitlements bestowed on tens of millions of people by successive governments, fuelled by short-term electoral cycles and the politics of outbidding your opponents is, in essence, undermining our ability to ensure democracy, fair representation and economic sustainability for future generations.

Absorbing Mr Hockey's speech, which you can read here, the fair-minded listener has two options.

The first is to burst into hysterical laughter, or begin thumping one's head rhythmically against the nearest vertical flat surface, seeing as Mr Hockey's side of politics not only has done much to establish the very sense of entitlement of which he complains, but has moreover appealed to it remorselessly in opposing various measures introduced by the Government in recent years.

Politics does contain some eye-popping moments of shameless reinvention, but a senior Opposition figure lamenting the entitlement culture having … oooh, let's pick one instance at random … described as "class war", last year, a modest Government decision to shave the number of families on $150,000 collecting family tax benefit?

It does make the eyes water, somewhat.

Phillip Coorey, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald today, gives a pretty solid account of the instances in which Mr Hockey and his colleagues have actively frustrated attempts to curb Government handouts.

The second option is to evaluate what Mr Hockey has said, and to give credit for his candour in this instance. And to wish him well in whatever witness protection scheme he now presumably resides, having supplied the Prime Minister with about a year's worth of material for use against Tony Abbott.

That a sense of entitlement has flourished in Australia over the last decade is entirely true. The incredible terms of trade that have blessed us since the early 2000s also created a new and luxurious facility for politicians – the ability to buy their way out of trouble, and thus to inure the electorate against pain.

Beginning with the GST, the "no one will be worse off" mantra took hold, with substantial reforms always accompanied by this assurance from governments, who could afford to offer it, thanks to the bouncing billions burped up by the commodities boom.

"No one will be worse off", when applied to reforms like the GST or Work Choices (or – indeed – to carbon pricing, where this approach has largely been continued even though the whole point of the entire exercise is supposed to be that some entities are much, much worse off, causing them to stop doing what they're doing) does a number of things.

First, "No one will be worse off" encourages everyone to believe that no-one SHOULD be any worse off. In other words, that reform should be a zero sum game even in the short term. This is a problem, given that the great driving force of reform is the concept of making short-term sacrifices in the interests of long-term improvement to our collective fortunes. This is not a trivial issue. In fact, the judgment of priorities, and the courage and advocacy involved in convincing a large group of people to accept short-term personal privation in the interests of long-term benefit, is about the most important thing we can ever ask of our leaders.

And yet, this is the very area in which Australian politics has foundered, possibly in response to the fat years we've just experienced.

"No one will be worse off" does other things, apart from training people to believe their own interests are unassailable. It also recasts the role of the media. When assured that "No one will be worse off", the media's task narrows – we set out barking and frothing to look for one person who is worse off, in order to disprove the Government's claim, rather than to consider more broadly the rationale behind the decision.

Mr Hockey's speech – which is already disappearing in a flurry of controversy about exactly which pensions he would cut – is at least a frank admission about the state of politics. And when questioned by Tony Jones last night on Lateline, the shadow Treasurer did not dissemble about his own party's contribution to the phenomenon, as Jones reminded him that by the end of the Howard Government, 42 per cent of taxpayers were actually receiving more in Government handouts than they were paying in tax:

TONY JONES: OK. A little bit of history then. You describe in the speech how the entitlement system grew in Western democracies. As you say, "Fuelled by short-term electoral cycles and the politics outbidding your opponent." Do you admit to being guilty yourself of this when last in government? JOE HOCKEY: Yes. TONY JONES: So this was bad, was it? JOE HOCKEY: Well, we did it. I mean, there are times when we did it, of course. TONY JONES: Have you had an epiphany where you did that, but decided that was a very bad thing for the economy? JOE HOCKEY: Well, what I have recognised is that Western countries are running out of money, that we are facing a more formidable opponent in Asia, an ally but an opponent from an economic perspective and we need to keep our pencil sharpened when it comes to entitlements.

No doubt the wing-ding about which entitlements exactly Mr Hockey would cut will continue to generate much heat and light. I read the speech more as a generalised observation about the entitlement mentality, rather than a distinct threat against genuine welfare recipients, who in any event have received far less generously indexed bounty (just ask anyone on Newstart) in the last decade than the better-heeled recipients of measures like the baby bonus, the private health insurance rebate, the first home buyer's grant, the negative gearing scheme, or indeed the industries who receive billions of dollars of Government assistance every year.

So wherever you are, Joe – hiding in some mansion next to Julian Assange's, or submerged under the Thames and breathing through a straw – thank you for your candour, at least.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.