Let’s be very clear: when treasurer Joe Hockey announced “the end of the age of entitlement” amidst the threatened closure of the SPC cannery in Shepparton, the withdrawal of Toyota from Australian manufacturing and the planned shutdown of Holden in South Australia, he was not talking about the expectations of corporate Australia. He was declaring an end only to a working-class expectation of basic job security.

Meanwhile, corporate entitlement is flourishing under the Coalition – and there are few better examples of it than Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

This week saw the jaw-dropping revelation, reported in the Australian Financial Review, that the single largest factor in the deterioration of the federal budget announced in December was “a cash payout of almost $900m to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation” by the Australian Tax Office. News Corp’s windfall was the result of years of creative paper transactions which allowed them to bill the Australian taxpayer for a “loss” recorded against a high Australian dollar. This is the same News Corporation that cited the former federal Labor government’s “spending profligacy” as the reason to “kick this mob out” with stupendous lack of self-awareness during the election campaign.

It will not surprise you to learn that the culture of entitlement at News Corp runs far deeper than merely costing the Australian taxpayer $882m – and how the Coalition are presently facilitating Murdoch’s habit of business practice somewhat contradicts Hockey’s blustering declamations against entitlement.

Consider, if you will, the Coalition’s very public concession to Murdoch press claims against the ABC. News Corp’s consistent campaign against the government broadcaster on the (disproven) grounds of its “bias” has been running for months, with the likes of Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt describing “the ABC’s capture by the Left to its suffocating size”. Similar sentiments have been echoed in statements like “the ABC seemed to delight in broadcasting allegations by a traitor” – although this statement did not come from Bolt. It came from the Tony Abbott, in January, amidst much discussion of governmental investigations and reviews into the operational future of the ABC.

The prime minister and Australia’s richest ex-pat are, of course, entitled to share views – Murdoch may control the majority of Australia’s press, but it is a free country, after all. What is more concerning is the Murdoch empire’s implied entitlement to the Australia Network, a broadcasting contract awarded by the former Gillard government to the ABC in preference over his own Sky News Service which also tendered for it.

Reports indicate that News Corp “resents what it sees as unfair competition from the ABC’s free digital content” and its columnists have loudly declaimed that having the independent, overseen organisation with a broadcast mission to 46 countries – as opposed to its own domestic market share and multinational reaches - as a reach “too big for her own good”. Fortunately for News Corp, the Coalition foreign minister Julie Bishop fears that under its present ABC direction, the Australia Network will be unable to meet its charter, and is reviewing the service’s contract.

This must be of great consolation to the old newspaperman Murdoch, who – entirely separately from his adventures with courts of law and investigation in the UK and US – has been weathering troublesome times for his news market in Australia. With the shift from newspaper consumption to a digital news market, Murdoch’s Australian properties are not making the money they used to, and there are indications that its reach of influence may be starting to wane.

News Corp has always been something of the lone middle-aged lecturer attending a banging undergraduate party when it comes to digital markets, as the disastrous News Corp takeover of social media site MySpace (remember that?) proved all too clearly. It must be some concern to Murdoch’s executives that the ABC has already captured 42% of the digital news market since Gillard expanded the organisation’s charter into online content publication. An ex-News Corp executive told Media Watch of the national print operations that “the business is heading towards the cliff”. The Australian is famously losing money, as is even The Daily Telegraph, while Media Watch reported that a group of Queensland publications have dropped from a profit of $270m “six or seven years ago” to 1/10th of that this year.

It makes recent government decisions around pay television – Murdoch’s other main business interest in Australia – all the more interesting. The NBN with a FTTP infrastructure as planned by Labor enables a broadcast delivery service of a speed and quality that far outstrips the “virtually unchallenged” present market position of the News-Corp-owned Foxtel service. Before the September election, Coalition opposition to FTTP was said to be based on cost - their policy to adopt the slower, non-competitive FTTN network was claimed to reduced expenditure in the “budget crisis”. But this week, Coalition spokesmen admitted that the estimate of the FTTP cost they had taken to the election was “perhaps a little high” - overestimated by no less than $34bn. Of course, the cost of the the FTTN network the Coalition is implementing has “increased since it was announced”, yet the government will be proceeding with inferior technology anyway.

The government will also be proceeding with a mission to overhaul the country’s present copyright laws pertaining to digital downloads - despite telling tech news service ZDNet before the election that the Coalition “had no policy” on such matters. The attorney general George Brandis announced a crackdown earlier this month, against recommendations for a flexible fair-use agreement as recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission.

It may be entirely coincidental that Murdoch’s Foxtel network has locked in Australian broadcast exclusivity for the blockbusting TV series Game of Thrones – one of the most downloaded programme in history – but it’s good fortune for News Corp, if not Game of Thrones watchers, that to catch the show you have no other legal option than to subscribe to Foxtel.

I’m not a Game of Thrones watcher, so I must, alas, deny readers of this piece a concluding analogy of Murdoch, the Coalition, pacts between houses and compromises within. What I can offer instead are facts that speak to campaigns for power, influence and - that word again - entitlement that chill the blood not for their fantastic possibilities, but for the impact on our nation here and now.