The Turnbull government is preparing to outline a fresh attempt to break the cycle of welfare dependency by targeting key groups including young carers and young parents.
Social Services Minister Christian Porter will tell the National Press Club on Tuesday there is "nothing morally superior or progressive" about handing out more money if it only serves to entrench the cycle of social security dependence.
But the government's first move will be to create a $96 million honey pot - the Try, Test and Learn Fund - to trial experimental initiatives aimed at getting key groups off the public books and into employment.
"Anyone who can see these human stories playing out on the ground can come to us with an idea," Mr Porter told ABC radio on Tuesday. "We will fund those solutions and measure them".
Off the back of a PricewaterhouseCoopers report commissioned by his predecessor Scott Morrison, Mr Porter pointed to young carers and young parents as two groups for whom welfare spending appeared to be failing.
According to the government, the report will show that among the nation's 11,200 young carers aged 15-24, the average person will spend 43 years on welfare and cost the taxpayer $500,000 each. The total lifetime bill for the group would be $5.2 billion.
Similarly, Australia's 4370 young parents (aged under 18) will spend an average of 45 years on welfare at a total cost of $2.4 billion. "This is a terrible failure and it needs to change," Mr Porter said.
Mr Porter will release the PwC report on Tuesday, but the government has been busy laying the groundwork. In an extended interview with News Corp at the weekend, Mr Porter warned the welfare system was "not making life any better" for many Australians, and that "too often it seems to make life worse over the long run".
While the Turnbull government's approach has been compared to reforms made in New Zealand, the minister said he was not pursuing short-term savings, and any financial benefits to the taxpayer would be "in the very long run".
But he noted the social security budget was growing at a rate of about six per cent and all portfolios needed to play a part in returning the budget to surplus.
"We are trying to move people out of the system," Mr Porter said on Tuesday. "To that extent we are using employment as a proxy for the better life."
He resisted criticism that welfare recipients often moved into poor quality, part-time and low-paid jobs with little opportunity for advancement.
"These types of jobs are far better than 40-odd years inside the welfare system," he said. The benefits of work were effectively "being taken away" from young people who became glued to the system, Mr Porter said, and they would never experience "that structure, that self-reliance, that dignity and purpose" of employment.
The PwC report also focused attention on students who slid into the welfare system. It warned almost half of the tertiary students aged 17-19 who started receiving government payments moved directly to unemployment benefits when they completed their studies and could stay there for several years.
However, this problem would be directly related to the difficulty graduates have had in finding work. According to at least one study, by the Foundation for Young Australians, it will take the average graduate up to five years to find full-time work after study.
