There’s a news story that may have passed you by last week with the botched egging and backfiring front-page attacks on mothers, but it’s one we ignore at our national peril.

It’s a story by my colleague, Luke Henriques-Gomes, about a Melbourne man who died from bowel cancer while waiting for his disability support pension claim to be approved.

The case was described by the man’s advocate as “one of the worst cases” she has seen, but not an isolated one. It is the latest in a series of incidents in which people who are sick and in need of – and entitled to – financial support from the government are refused help or made to wait unbearable lengths of time for it, including that of a Victorian woman undergoing chemotherapy who was knocked back for the pension and a New South Wales woman with stage-four colon cancer who had her claim denied in March.

The story should appal us. But it also should frighten us, because we know where this road leads. When you refuse the pension claims of those who are sick, make them jump through impossible hoops to gain even the most meagre of government support, and sanction them for minute infractions, you are not describing a dystopia, you are describing Britain.

I spent four years living in England while it was in the grip of the Conservatives’ austerity policies, which I should add are ongoing. This was – and still is – a brutal time to be poor in the UK.

Councils had their budgets slashed so harshly that they stopped gritting the roads, which prevents cars skidding on the ice, turned off street lights at night to save money, cancelled programs for young children from low-income families that were proven to work in improving educational outcomes.

Thousands of families were forced to turn to charities in order to feed themselves, with the largest food bank network in the country distributing 1.6m emergency parcels in 2018, up 73% in five years. In 2018 there were one million more children in poverty in the country than there were in 2010, and across the country about 14 million people live in poverty – a fifth of the population. A fifth. Let that number sink in.

In 2018, the UN poverty envoy found that the UK government had inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited and often callous” policies. We have seen the poisoned fruits of these policies in the fractious, hate-filled tone of public life in Brexit Britain.

Is it any surprise that people who felt left behind and voiceless, who saw the country as working for some but certainly not for them and their families, voted to throw the status quo up in the air? Or that people who had been told there was only the tiniest sliver of government pie available to help those in need and that if they didn’t toe the line exactly they wouldn’t get a crumb of it, decided to turn on their neighbours, on the EU, on migrants in general and refugees in particular, rather than scream at the government to cut a bigger slice?

Some of the meanest-spirited and most callous of these policies were reserved for those who sought financial help from the government, through benefits.

People applying for disability benefits in particular found that austerity Britain was a very mean place. There were reports of cruel assessments, where applicants had to perform humiliating physical tasks to prove their disability, like climbing on tables, where the assessment of a civil servant about someone’s fitness to work was considered more valid than a doctor’s, which led to cases like that of a man ruled “fit to work” despite being so severely ill he weighed just six stone (38kg) and could not walk 20m.

People in Britain regularly have their payments stopped or docked – sanctioned in the government parlance – for missing appointments and not applying for enough jobs, like the man who missed an appointment at the job centre due to being at the hospital with his partner who had just suffered a stillbirth, or a man being told to walk 44 miles to attend a job interview, despite having had a stroke.

These stories are everywhere in Britain and they are ongoing.

Australia is not Britain and there is not the same level of callousness built in to our benefits system, not through some great virtue of ours, but largely because we didn’t suffer the same impact of the global financial crisis and because our government did not opt for a policy of austerity to deal with the economic downturn.

But the case of this man in Melbourne – dying as he was still waiting for an assessment on his pension – and stories of the punitive ParentsNext system that the Australian Human Rights Commission has said breaches human rights, and which has seen one-fifth of parents’ payments sanctioned, should ring alarm bells.

We already have the dangerous rhetoric that dehumanises people seeking help in our country, from “lifters and leaners”, to “dole bludgers”, to the prime minister’s more subtle dog whistle that he wants to see “a fair go for those who have a go”, praising those who “make a contribution and don’t seek to take one”.

As we hear this rhetoric and see these cases crop up, we have a choice: we can walk the same mean road that Britain has and end up where they are, in a place where people die trying to get the help they need, or we can take the warning from their example and choose a different path.

Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust