So Tony Abbott has told the sacked workers at Holden that the pieces of lives and careers that they're holding in their hands are actually "liberation".

Let me explain to the prime minister of this country just what that "liberation" feels like to a family who is living through the sudden event of unemployment. When I was 13, my dad left one job after he had been offered another one – and the new job fell through. My parents had only just taken out a mortgage, and now dad was unemployed.

We were working-class people, and so were my parents' friends. When you're a working-class person who loses a job, there's no liquid capital on hand to buy your way into retraining or consider a business opportunity. There's no powerful network of privileged mates who can offer you a consultancy, a designed position, a sinecure, or maybe offer up a $300k a year job just because they like you. And the best your friends can do for you in that situation is not, actually, to talk about it.

People who only value money can perhaps understand that unemployment is horrifying because there are bills to pay. But the horrific stress of unemployment is not only trying to keep them paid, but to get a new job at the same level as soon as possible, lest a beast even worse than the loss of financial status – the loss of personal dignity – crawls out of its cave.

What people who only value money can't or won't imagine is the soul-shattering destruction of pride that goes with unemployment. This is why your real friends stay silent: because patronising offers or condolences do more damage than a beating with a blunt bat. It's an easy protocol for everyone to accommodate. And in case Abbott doesn't know it's also why, when unemployed, you don't socialise much.

The events which pushed dad into unemployment were entirely beyond his control – just like Holden's collapse is not to blame on its workers – but he was humiliated by them anyway. He was a man who defined himself by a willingness to work hard, and his ambitions were simple: to look after my mother and provide his only child everything he could to realise her dreams. When he became unemployed the two simple pillars of his character – his self-belief and role as a provider – were annihilated by forces beyond his control.

I can now write about this openly only because my beloved father is dead. He was a fantastically resilient man who never cried but with the sense of personal failure that accompanied the disappearance of his income, he talked about killing himself. He raged at my mother for staying with him. He raged at me and when I made him a cheese toastie as a peace offering, he hurled it against the wall. I had failed to comprehend that my acts of charity were corroding any self-esteem he had left.

How long did this family trauma go on for? A total of six weeks. Dad was lucky: he found another job and life returned to normal. Mum gave him dispensation for acting like a twit, the mortgage got paid. Unlike Holden workers, dad was in an industry that hadn't collapsed and he wasn't one of many competing against one another for the scraps of opportunities left behind.

There are indeed two kinds of liberations going on today, but they certainly don't belong to the unemployed and their families; they both belong to Abbott. The first is his liberation of language from meaning, given that the personal, palpable, physical and psychological horror of redundancy is now happily propagandised as "freedom". The second is the prime minister liberating himself from the obligations of the most basic form of protocol – that when a family has been kicked to the ground, you don't stand there smiling and tell them to enjoy it.