Is Joe Hockey the most disrespectful former politician in Australia?

Think that's disrespectful? Let me introduce you to the man I'd classify as the politician least likely to respect the Australian electorate.

When in office, he spent his time trashing all of us really, except the wealthy. Politician Joe Hockey went out of his way to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfy.

This week, he's telling us - again - that the age of entitlement should be over. Let me remind you that this is the bloke who told those trying to buy their first homes should quit whining about how expensive everything is and "get a good job that pays good money". Also the bloke who said: "The poorest people either don't have cars or actually don't drive very far in many cases."

And that is just a couple of his ill-informed remarks about the Australian public.

But he will always be remembered for this: if you put all our budgets in a row and rated them on how they treated Australians, Joe Hockey's 2014 budget would win the day as Australia's meanest ever budget. It hurt everyone on welfare, from single parents to those on disability pensions to students. It destroyed Australia's car industry. He even tried to cut to those hard-working champions across the nation, our community legal centres.

Remember he tried to make young people wait six months before getting the dole (in which time they would have starved), letting universities set their own fees and charging bulk-billed patients a $7 co-payment to see the doctor. That wasn't, dear reader, by any definition bulk-billing.

As he delivered his first budget, he said: "We are a nation of lifters, not leaners ... We are a great nation. We are a great people. By everyone making a contribution now, we will build, together, a better Australia."

Labor argued most of the measures were unfair and Hockey was unable to convince anyone to support the changes. By 2015, he was trying to rewrite history. No budget emergency, a few tough measures. Fortunately, much of what he planned never came to pass.

He passed though - at least as a politician. That budget undid him. Hockey handed down one more budget then left politics, unhappy that Malcolm Turnbull wouldn't keep him on as treasurer.

Now he's back, telling us all how to live our lives and in the news again, criticising politicians for spending too much money in order to keep power. He was speaking in London at the Institute for Economic Affairs and warning on the dangers of entitlement culture.

"The entitlement to hold on to power. The entitlement to be popular no matter what the cost ... that sense of entitlement, that you can give people everything they want, is a cancer in our community," he said. "We will all pay a price."

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And the mindset that said it was the right thing to do, to slash the public service, never changed. The mayhem and the carnage didn't disturb him. He said in his speech that yes, he found it hard, reading the letters from families impacted by his cuts "but at the end of the day, it had no material impact on the delivery of services."

As if services matter more than people. As if.

While it frustrates me that Hockey wants to clamber back into the spotlight, it's not enough for me just to disagree with his opinions.

He also made the claim in his speech that the majority of his controversial 2014 first budget had gone on to be delivered. I call bollocks.

So I called John Hawkins for a fact check. Hawkins headed the economics division at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, was a senior economist with the Reserve Bank of Australia, with the Bank for International Settlements and with Australian Treasury. He was also secretary to the Senate Economics Committee. Now he's a senior lecturer at the University of Canberra. He knows what's what.

Here's what he says about Hockey's claims.

"The budget was politically inept. Because there was a lot of opposition to it, much didn't get through. It caused a lot of pain for not much economic gain.

"And it dared car manufacturers to leave Australia. The government was surprised when its bluff was called."

Yes, a lot knocked back by the Senate. A little modified. And most of it just went nowhere.

But let's not pretend the former treasurer has no legacy. Let me remind you of what I consider to be his greatest legacy.

That would be the images of him, smoking a fat cigar, with his co-conspirator and then finance minister Mathias Cormann. There he is, a few days after putting the finishing touches to his budget, a few days out from handing it down. A few days before we knew what an utter shitshow it would be for most of us.

And there he is, looking so pleased with himself. And if we didn't know before that, we knew then he was completely out of touch with the rest of us.

But look, not everything in that speech was self-aggrandising and a rewriting of the history the rest of us saw happen. Hockey has had a post-politics epiphany. He spent a lot of time while in office - a lot of time - complaining about the public service and how bloated it was. You'll remember he planned to slash 3000 jobs in the Australian Tax Office to cut or scrap more than 200 government programs.

He said at the time: "You can have lots of small programs that involve a massive amount of red tape with very little outcome."

But since leaving public life, he has discovered bureaucracy in big business was far worse than in the public service. Much insight.

Let's vow from now to ditch the real leaners in our society. We lift them up to high office and then they forget how they got there. They get to keep their fabulously comfy parliamentary pensions while everyone else struggles.

Hey Joe, good to see you are still thinking about what's good for Australia. Can you lend us a couple of grand?