If anyone entertained doubts that the Abbott government was a pack of bastards, its decision to spend $24 billion on buying and operating 58 fighter jets while simultaneously foreshadowing billions in cuts to social security, health and education should put them to an end.

The government and the Audit Commission, chaired by the chief of the Business Council and former Transfield Services boss Tony Shepherd, are lying through their teeth when they claim a budget emergency. They say that cuts are needed to deal with a pensions “blow-out”.

This is a first class furphy.

Pensions have been funded by taxpayers year after year even though the number of aged dependents has kept increasing, for the simple reason that productivity has gone up decade after decade. So long as governments accrue some of the benefits of higher productivity by taxing companies, they can fund the age pension indefinitely.

The problem is that company tax has been slashed from 48 percent in the early 1980s to 30 percent today, while marginal income tax rates have been cut by the same amount, reducing government revenues.

Abbott, Hockey and social services minister Kevin Andrews also point to allegedly “unsustainable” outlays on social security payments, including spending on the dole, Disability Support Pensions (DSP), lone parent payments, carers’ allowances, student support and sickness allowances.

This is another big fat lie.

While the numbers of those receiving the DSP and Newstart have risen over the past five years, the proportion of those of working age receiving income support payments of all kinds has fallen since 1996 from 25 percent to 17 percent, back to where it was in 1983.

Further proof that this budget “emergency” is a fabrication is the Australian government’s triple-A credit rating, ranking it as one of the most solvent in the world. According to the OECD, Australia’s government debt to GDP ratio will hit 16 percent in 2015, peanuts compared to the OECD average of 73 percent.

Entitlements for the rich

If there were a genuine budget crisis, there are plenty of places Hockey should be looking before attacking the poor. Because, when it comes to Hockey’s “entitlement mentality”, the rich think of nothing else.

Whether it’s the tax concessions on superannuation – costing Treasury more than $30 billion this year, projected to rise to $51 billion by 2016-17 – the exemption of mansions from capital gains tax, the $4 billion shovelled to mining companies every year or the hundreds of millions spent annually on boosting the bottom line of manufacturing companies, big business and the wealthy are cossetted by working class taxpayers.

Hockey tells us that “nothing is free – someone always pays”, and workers should expect to shell out for government services, including the right to see a GP or be admitted to hospital. Tell that to Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest – everything is laid out for them on a silver platter, no questions asked!

Stripping back tax concessions on super, which overwhelmingly benefit the rich, would easily bankroll the age pension. In fact, these handouts will actually outstrip pension spending by 2016-17. Taxing family trusts used by the rich to squirrel away their money would raise an extra $3.3 billion over the next four years, while adding a 5 percent super tax on those “earning” more than $1 million a year would raise nearly $1 billion over the same period, according to calculations by the Greens.

Taking back buses, trams, railways, roads and electricity generation into public ownership would remove the massive handouts to private operators that bleed the budgets of state and federal governments. Scrapping Abbott’s ridiculous “Direct Action” plan designed, allegedly, to curb carbon emissions, but in reality nothing more than corporate welfare, would save $2.5 billion over four years.

Introducing a mining tax that did something to recoup the massive profits that the mining companies have gouged out over the past decade could generate more billions in income, while cancelling the order for the F35 fighter jets would save $12 billion, plus an additional $12 billion in operating costs over the life of the planes.

And how about we allow asylum seekers to be processed in the community, bringing to an end the constant leeching of public funds by Serco, Toll, Transfield and G4S? Just in the last four years, these four have hit the government for $5.6 billion for their “services”, bullying and bludgeoning the most vulnerable. And, while we’re at it, let’s cancel the recently inked $3 billion contract for surveillance drones.

Make no mistake, Abbott and Co. are running a government serving the interests of the rich. They talk about everyone sharing the heavy lifting, but they burn tens of billions of our money on jet fighters while condemning old people, the sick and the unemployed to misery. And they want to do this at the very time that wages for those in work are falling behind inflation for the first time in years.

They and their corporate urgers in the media are nothing but liars and thieves.