So much for “Christian values”. On Easter Sunday, the Daily Telegraph assaulted readers with a remarkably vicious attack on some of Australia’s most disadvantaged citizens.

“Centrelink welfare cheats to lose payments if they fail to look for work under new laws”, screamed the headline of a report that used every pejorative term in the conservative book to describe people living on Newstart while they look for work.

“Lazy jobseekers” and “disobedient dole bludgers” could lose their “taxpayer-funded handouts”, we were told, in “new laws [that] pass Parliament last week”. It was an extraordinary punch-down on people who are barely surviving on the stingy safety net we provide them when they fall on hard times.

It’s becoming the worst kind of holiday habit. Three months ago, in that sleepy week between Christmas and New Year, Australians woke up to headlines telling them that the average Australian worker was paying $83 a week to “pay the nation’s growing welfare bills”.

The Daily Telegraph then lamented that “average taxpayers are handing over $35 every week to prop up aged pensioners”, as though those being “propped up” on the inadequate pension hadn’t made any contribution to their own welfare throughout their working lives.

The tabloids, of course, are dutifully delivering a narrative dictated by government media releases and cherry-picked data. Despite the fact that Australia’s tax and transfer system is the most tightly targeted in the OECD, it seems the government is intent on demonising our most disadvantaged citizens as a terrible burden on the rest of society.

But this narrative is wrong. As demonstrated by recent research undertaken by Per Capita for Anglicare, the cost to our nation of subsidising the lifestyles of the wealthiest 20% of Australians far exceeds that spent on providing support for any single welfare group.

In a week when the government was desperately scrambling to ram through its gift of billions of dollars in tax cuts to large corporations, treasurer Scott Morrison in question time and rightwing cheerleaders in the media attempted to distract from the facts of the report by claiming we had called for an end to the capital gains tax concession on the family home.

Of course, we did no such thing. The benefit afforded by the CGT concession disproportionately goes to the owners of expensive homes, which is why it was included in calculating the total largesse that goes to the wealthy in foregone tax revenue.

But the report itself simply demonstrates that, in looking for budget savings to repay debt and fund essential services, the government has options other than cracking down harder on people already living in poverty – as it did the day after the release of our report, with the passage of the so-called “welfare reform bill”.

As celebrated in the tabloids, this particularly nasty piece of legislation makes it harder than ever for unemployed Australians – of whom, on latest figures, there are 10 for every three available jobs – to get the measly $273 a week they are expected to live on while they look for work.

The bill, which has been defended by human services minister Alan Tudge as “simplifying” our unemployment benefits system, actually implements a number of incredibly mean measures designed to punish jobseekers, apparently in the belief that this will “motivate” them to find jobs that simply aren’t available in a country with more than 1.8million people looking for more work.

Those measures include no longer backdating Newstart payments to the date the applicant first made a claim, and preventing job seekers using drug or alcohol dependency as an excuse for failing to meet “mutual obligation” requirements.

It will impose even more draconian punishments on people who miss job interviews or appointments with Centrelink, regardless of the fact that many may be suffering from mental illness, or fleeing domestic violence, or homeless, or simply caring for their kids.

The legislation, which after significant amendment in the Senate won’t deliver many savings to the budget at all, will, according to Acoss, cut more than 80,000 people off payments in 12 months, making life even more miserable for people already living below the poverty line in one of the wealthiest nations on earth.

Yet in the excitement over the government’s determination to pass a tax cut for big business, the media paid it scant attention – until Sunday’s extraordinary attack.

It’s heartening, then, to find that new independent South Australian Senator, Tim Storer, has nominated raising the rate of Newstart as a “priority” of his three year term.

As the government seeks to prosecute its agenda to subsidise wealthy Australians through forgone tax revenue by pressuring Storer and Derryn Hinch to support their unaffordable largesse towards big business, they’ll have to keep grappling with the facts – facts like those we published last week.

Our research for Anglicare used exactly the same methodology, drawn from a question on notice during budget estimates from Senator Eric Abetz to treasury officials last year, as the government used to determine that Newstart recipients cost the “average taxpayer” just $6 per week to support.

And we found that the same taxpayer is contributing $37 a week to make up for the shortfall in government revenue due to tax concessions for people living high on the hog.

Yet, according to Tudge, it’s “non-genuine job seekers” the rest of us should resent. “People don’t want to see their taxpayer dollars funding the lifestyles of people who refuse to look for work and do the right thing”, he thundered in defence of his nasty laws.

But Tudge and his cronies have read the Australian people wrong.

If the government wants to understand why it can’t pass its big business tax cuts, maybe they should ask those “average taxpayers” whether they’d rather give a bit more than the current six bucks a week to someone living below the poverty line while they look for work, or keep handing over $37 to someone negatively gearing an investment property and using a family trust to reduce their taxable income.

I reckon I know the answer, and I think Tim Storer does too.

• Emma Dawson is Executive Director of thinktank Per Capita