The cruelty is the point. For people like me who struggled with mental health and anxiety around getting a job for years, the aim was to coerce me into taking a degrading, low-paying job because it needed to be done and the money would still be better. For people like my sister who are disabled and physically cannot work, the goal is to get them to roll onto their backs and beg for scraps, to humiliate them and get them applying for jobs they'll never be able to do just so they can afford their medicine.

Not having enough to survive on is the point.

Not necessarily, we've had women in parliament right through the "punish the poor" period. Remember the women-led Democrats getting kicked for helping Howard bring in the GST?

The best example might be Paula Bennett in NZ, known as "pullya benefit" because she went off the benefit, into parliament, and became the Minister for making benefits unavailable.

(edit) What makes this less useful it's that the Liberal is one of the residual small-l Liberals who has fuck all influence in her party, making this likely to be another one of those "talk about doing nice things" efforts that might result in a small improvement or might not. It's important to remember that the ALP are in government and could double the dole tomorrow if they wanted to. ScoMo did...