The government has announced that it’s going to get tough on welfare. Again. Earlier this month, with the help of Labor, it waved through an omnibus bill that will cut payments to more than 2.2 million people on welfare, among other attacks. This time, carers and single parents are in the crosshairs.

The government recommendation is unashamedly cruel: kick people off. It wants to end the “culture of welfare dependency” by giving people nothing to depend upon. It’s like solving oxygen dependency with suffocation.

Carers receive around $120 a fortnight – a pittance that puts many well below the poverty line. For many, it takes years to prove that they are eligible for the payment at all.

The same cruelty behind the plan to pull these meagre payments is what led to the burden of care being placed on individuals and families in the first place. Following the 1983 Richmond report, state and federal governments began closing down (underfunded and deplorable) government care facilities for the disabled and mentally ill. The promise that these services would be replaced by “community care” never eventuated.

Stripping carers of their payments will lead to increased poverty for some of the most vulnerable in society – not only the carers, but also those they care for.

Single parents are also in the firing line. The Gillard government laid the basis for this by cutting payments for single parents once their children reach the age of eight. This resulted in 68,000 people, mainly women, being kicked off welfare. Now the Liberals want to go after the rest.

Removing welfare payments for carers and single parents has been inspired by similar attacks in New Zealand that reclassify people as “job seekers” even when they are full time carers.

Attacking the welfare system has always been a key part of neoliberalism, and the rhetoric aimed at demonising welfare recipients is always the same: “They are bludgers. The rest of us are hard working”.

Christian Porter, minister for social services, made this argument about young carers and single parents when he launched the government’s “investigation into welfare”. And, for good measure, he speculated that carers might be compounding their dependency with the overuse of drugs and alcohol.

According to the Australian, Porter worked hard to get into parliament “with personal references from mining magnate Andrew Forrest, Rio Tinto CEO Sam Walsh and former premier Richard Court”. His legacy as a state parliamentarian in Western Australia is a law and order agenda that resulted in a significant increase of the Aboriginal prison population.

During the press conference, Porter cited a special report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers: “We face a total estimated future lifetime welfare cost of the present Australian population of $4.8 trillion”.

This calculation is based on forward projections to the year 2085. I’m unaware of PwC, a corporation accused by MPs in the UK of “promoting tax avoidance on an industrial scale”, compiling any such projections about the amount lost to government due to corporate tax avoidance over the same time frame.

One 2014 examination of avoidance and minimisation by the largest 200 Australian companies alone estimated that $8.4 billion in government revenue was forgone every year.

The real bludgers in our society are the likes of Christian Porter and his corporate mates. The latest investigation into welfare is rigged from the outset, just as the entire game is. The theft of wealth by those at the top of society is at a historic high. Yet no amount of theft satisfies their appetite.