It is a smash and grab job – smash workers and grab their future. That’s the Liberal way.

Poverty is rising, but households in the poorest suburbs of Australia’s largest cities will be made $2,500-$3,500 worse off per year if the federal government gets away with it, according to research from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling in Canberra. It’s just a box of cigars for Joe Hockey or a wristwatch for finance minister Mathias Cormann. For many families, however, it’s 5 percent or more of their income – it’s food, it’s medical bills, it’s school books, it’s petrol. And then add inflation. They’re going to be “incentivised” by being starved out by the prevailing economic dogma.

That’s only one item on the agenda.

The education system is being corporatised and privatised under the guise of creating “independent schools”. And a pilot program that will allow corporations to shape school curricula is in the pipeline. Modelled on an IBM-led collaboration in Brooklyn, New York, the initiative is billed as “innovative” and an aid to students getting a job. It will be another inhuman exercise, a fast track to subsuming young labour to capital, fashioning pre-programmed commodities ready to add value, narrowly defined as augmenting some entrepreneur’s cash flow, before the subjects are cast onto the scrap heap of unemployment if and when their lives cease to fulfil that narrow economic function.

It won’t end there. If they are unable to beg their way into another enterprise – to convince a prospective employer that, out of the dozens of applicants, they will deliver the greatest return on investment while retaining that “thank you, master” deference – the expanding work for the dole schemes will no doubt offer them up, semi-bonded, at a discount. Even the figment of the classical liberal freedom of contract is dissolving in the 21st century “learn or earn” economy.

Where is the future for people who work under this Liberal world order? Those who deliver the services, build the cities, tend to the sick and injured, teach the young, keep the shelves stocked with food and light the streets – those who provide all the things that the people at the top of society take for granted? It’s being drowned out by the wage-cutting chorus of conservative ministers and business lobbyists.

In Western Australia the Liberal government has announced plans to sell 20 state assets, including power stations and more hospitals. In Queensland the Liberal National Party has sold off more than $10 billion in state assets since being elected in 2012; another 1,000 government-owned properties are earmarked for sale.

Liberal politicians don’t build the assets. They don’t provide the services. They don’t lift a finger. Yet they squander the future of those who do. There is no “social” for these parasites, no public good that can’t be measured according to the private gain accruing to their mates on the boards of the companies buying the assets – boards on which some of them will no doubt sit once their pilfering political careers have delivered.

What happens to the elderly, who worked all their lives creating the things now being sold but who rely on the pittance of a pension? Their remaining years should be a time to relax, to enjoy the world they constructed. The Liberals have a simple calculation: if they can’t generate profits for the private sector by working for a company, then they’ll contribute to the bottom line by being a customer – of the hospital, of the utility company, of the bank. Those without resources will be left to the locusts.

And what of the next generation – the inheritors of degraded urban landscapes, user-pays economies and monotonous and precarious jobs? Their future is collapsing along with the ecosystem they are destined to inhabit. The prime minister, whose words steal precious seconds of our consciousness, last week said, “Coal is good for humanity”. Even the concept of humanity collapses, under the Liberal order, into that of corporate profitability.

That’s the Liberal way.