The social services minister, Christian Porter, is considering expanding “mutual obligation” requirements for welfare recipients so they refrain from excessive alcohol or illicit drug use.



He is also considering linking welfare payments to school attendance.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Tuesday, Porter said the Turnbull government was determined to reduce intergenerational welfare dependency.

He said the success of the “No Jab, No Pay” program – introduced on 1 January, and which threatened to withhold childcare and family tax payments of up to $15,000 a year from parents who didn’t immunise their children before 18 March – had been hugely rewarding.

Since the start of that program, immunisation rates for one, two and five-year-olds have gone up and one and five-year-old coverage rates have now reached 93% for the first time.

Porter said the No Jab, No Pay program had worked well because it had been designed to “within an inch of its life” and its policy approach could be adopted in other areas of welfare policy.

“I must say that one of them, to my way of thinking, is the linking of payments to school attendance,” he said. “That’s an idea that’s been mulled over for a long time but, with the sort of data that we’ve got available, and the ability to track longitudinally success rates on a range of measures, I think these things are worth looking at.”

He said similar “mutual obligation requirements” for welfare recipients could be used to help welfare recipients get off drugs and alcohol.

“Why could mutual obligation not extend, in appropriate circumstances, to an obligation to refrain from excessive alcohol or from illicit drug use where the evidence clearly shows it creates barriers to employment, to obligations to turn up in a timely manner to key work appointments, to pay debts owed to the taxpayer, or to ensure children attend school?” he said.

“If there was ever a time to consolidate the complicated mess of 16 different types of working age payments into a simpler, fairer system, with more thorough and consistent mutual obligations, then that time would be when we have the data available to help us design better structures, rules and systems, and the data is now available.”



He also argued against increasing the Newstart allowance, saying the Australian Council of Social Service (Acoss) wanted to increase Newstart by $53 a week, at a cost to the budget of $7.7bn, but that was hard to justify.

He said 75% of 770,000 Newstart recipients receive two extra payment types besides Newstart and 20% receive one extra payment type.

“Only 5% get just Newstart,” he said, adding that it therefore did not make sense to increase Newstart for everyone when only a tiny proportion of all recipients were completely reliant on the payment.

Porter made the comments after a speech outlining his plan to reduce intergenerational welfare dependency, which involves using actuarial analysis to unpack the lifetime patterns of people receiving welfare payments and benefits.

Porter said his “priority investment approach” was less preoccupied with cutting spending on social services and more focused on identifying and eliminating “welfare traps” through evidence-based approaches and innovative policy solutions.

But the shadow minister for social services, Jenny Macklin, has criticised Porter for his plans, saying he failed to say how he would invest in vulnerable people to help them get into the workforce.

“It’s not an ‘investment approach’ if you’re cutting support to vulnerable Australians,” Macklin said. “The Turnbull government is still committed to harsh zombie measures from the 2014 and 2015 budgets that actually punish vulnerable Australians.”

The Greens senator Rachel Siewert was also critical.

“To argue in National Press Club against a Newstart increase demonstrates a poor understanding of how much the most vulnerable are struggling to get by,” Siewert said.