The Abbott Government, and its supporters in business and the media, hold our egalitarian Australia in contempt, and they see this term of government as their chance to feed it to the sharks, writes Tim Dunlop.

We need to stop pretending that the Government's work-for-the-dole scheme has anything to do with "mutual obligation", or helping the unemployed get a job, and just accept the obvious: its intention is first and foremost to discipline and punish jobseekers while avoiding dealing with the circumstances that cause unemployment in the first place.

It is the very fact that the Government is incapable of actually dealing with unemployment - and has no interest in doing so - that makes it necessary for them to project their failure back onto the unemployed themselves, to design a unemployment scheme that is less about getting people jobs than about blaming workers for the fact that there aren't enough jobs to get.

The Kafkaesque nature of this charade was beautifully illustrated the other night by none other than Eric Abetz, the Employment Minister, who had this wondrous exchange with host, Emma Alberici:

EMMA ALBERICI: Now you want people to apply for 40 jobs a month - that's roughly two jobs per working day. Are you confident that especially in places like your state of Tasmania, there will actually be that many positions available for each person? ERIC ABETZ: What we're asking most of the jobseekers to do is to seek a job of a morning and of an afternoon and I think that is a reasonable request to make of our fellow Australians... EMMA ALBERICI: I am sorry to interrupt you, but the question specifically I was saying was: will there be that many positions to apply for in a place like Tasmania, for instance, where jobs are already so sparse? ERIC ABETZ: When jobs are sparse, it means that you've got to apply for more jobs to get a job.

Wrap your head around that. When jobs are sparse, the way to get a job is to apply for more of the jobs that, by definition, don't exist in sufficient numbers, because they are, as the Minister himself said, sparse.

Not to be outdone in their rush through the looking glass, The Australian newspaper, stenographer-in-chief to, and project manager of the Abbott moment, editorialised:

In the Government's draft model announced yesterday, jobseekers will be compelled to conduct 40 job searches a month and carry out up to 25 hours a week of community work to keep dole payments. It may be that such exacting requirements prove to be too onerous, as some business and community groups argue, given the weakness of the labour market and that there is a risk that young people become stuck on "work for the dole" schemes. Still, the intention deserves support in the ongoing battle against passive welfare.

So they admit it most likely won't work, because they know the labour market is weak, but hey, they conclude, let's support it anyway.

Discipline and punish. Or to use the Oz's euphemism, "the ongoing battle against passive welfare".

A policy that demands, on threat of sanction, that the unemployed apply for 40 jobs per month, do 25 hours of community service a week, and wait six months before getting their first cheque, is not meant as a serious policy but as a humiliating ritual of subordination.

In case you are in any doubt about this, the editorial continues:

The welfarist Greens said the moves were cruel and would demonise the unemployed, so the Coalition is on the right track.

Decent people, like many of those on the conservative/right side of politics who, with the best of intentions, voted Abbott into office, have trouble getting their head around the abject nature of such policies.

They think that nobody could actually be that vindictive because they presume the Abbott Government basically shares their views; that it is, at worst, maybe a slightly more extreme version of, say, the Howard government.

It isn't.

The work-for-dole scheme and all the other crazy things they are doing - from deregulating university fees, to defunding the CSIRO, to Medicare copayments, to the attacks on the renewable energy sector - are not "policies" in the sense that we normally understand the term.

They are not designed for the betterment of society as a whole, but for the enforcement of a particular worldview to the exclusion of all others.

Nearly everything this Government has done - as opposed to what it said it was going to do - has been aimed at either punishing their enemies or rewarding the select few.

As Peter Martin recently noted, the budget's effects are long term, not short term, and they are designed to entrench fundamental change:

In the longer term the changes will be profound if the newly installed Senate approves them. The only prime minister in living memory to have put forward such a far-sighted program is Labor's Gough Whitlam. And just as many of Whitlam's measures became part of the social fabric and almost impossible to undo, Abbott's changes will stick. If you doubt that he is governing for the long term rather than the electoral cycle, consider the timing. Almost all his measures build up slowly, beginning to have an effect at or just beyond the next election.

So this is not a Government in the normal understanding of the term. It is a right wing vanguard operating within a massively transformed global political and economic landscape, fighting the good fight on behalf of a tiny percentage of the already comfortable.

It is authoritarian by nature because when you have ceded control of the economy to "the market", to international finance and pan-nationalist organisations like the World Bank and the WTO, all you have left to justify your existence is constant intrusion into people's lives, especially those you perceive as your enemies.

Royal commissions into trade unions and the previous government's policies; defunding of the organisations of civil society who don't toe the government line on everything from the environment to asylum seekers; defunding the social safety net, including pensions - all of these things are aimed at rewriting the social contract many of us took for granted.

And all in the name of what?

As Australian's we are not always hugely comfortable with self-reflection, of taking a birdseye view of our circumstances and assessing dispassionately. On the whole, I think this is a strength rather than a weakness.

Still, this might be a time to do just that, to step back and wonder out loud what sort of society we want to live in.

Politics is about values as much as anything else, so what are ours?

History and geography have, in world terms, bequeathed us something of the follower's role. We are a minor power, with less people on an entire continent than some single cities elsewhere. We are and have been the companion of great powers and empires, willing, in a sometimes noble, sometimes obsequious way, to do their bidding. We have our moments, good and bad.

One thing we can be justly proud of is that somewhere in our collective soul, whether by design or accident or habit, we have developed and cultivated this odd sense of the fair go, of a rough sort of equality and social justice, where the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to those with knowledge, but where tax and redistribution happen to them all.

The Abbott Government, and its supporters in business and the media, hold that Australia, egalitarian Australia, in contempt, and they see this term of government as their chance to feed it to the sharks.

Why would any of us, let alone the conservatives whom they have most betrayed, let them get away with that?

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. You can follow him on Twitter. View his full profile here.