New Social Services Minister Christian Porter has called for a "grown-up" discussion on reforming the overstretched welfare sector.
He's a former West Australian treasurer but anyone who has ever balanced a household budget knows that, as a nation, we can't keep welfare funding levels at their present level without sending the nation deeper into the red.
As Porter told The Daily Telegraph's Daniel Meers: "Many of our payments are growing at a rate greater than the ability of the tax base to sustain them. 
"We want a system that is fair and sustainable.
"It would be inherently unfair to stretch the safety net to breaking point." The welfare spending trajectory is truly frightening but Labor and the Greens refuse to recognise this.
Away in la-la land, the two leftwing parties are firmly bogged in forms of Neanderthal socialism that rightfully belong in the museum of failed philosophies.
Yet they are both championed by the monolithic -taxpayer-funded state broadcaster, the ABC, and the terminally challenged anti-capitalist publisher Fairfax, and, according to the surveys, are the parties of choice for young Australians.
Forget turkeys voting for Thanksgiving - or Christmas. Young Australians attracted to the leftwing parties are voting for a tax burden that will handicap them for the rest of their lives.
Unless the government is able to achieve meaningful reforms to welfare spending now, Australians who are now in their 20s will be saddled with unsustainable debts which are inevitably going to make their 40s and 50s -unbearable.
This is part of the reason Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's call for the voting age to be lowered to 16 is so hopelessly irresponsible and must be called for the sheer populism that it is.
Porter wants an adult conversation, while Shorten wants the national conversation to be conducted in the kindy playground.
That's why Labor and the Greens are currently blocking the Coalition's attempt to prevent school leavers from going straight on to the dole when they walk out of the school gates.
Where the Coalition believes that school leavers should wait a month - and hopefully find some sort of a job - casual, part-time, whatever - and set a pattern for their adult life before accessing the dole, Labor and the Greens would like to see them locked onto the welfare tit as soon as possible so they will be reliant on government handouts for the remainder of their lives.
With eight out of 10 Australians currently paying taxes solely to meet the growing welfare bill, it is easy for clear-eyed people to see exactly why encouraging even greater numbers to fall into the welfare trap is catastrophically insane.
With the Disability Support Pension payments and Newstart Allowances set to blow out astronomically, these areas must be the first to be reviewed and reformed.
More than 70 per cent of dole recipients have been on the Newstart Allowance, which has a maximum single recipient's payment of $523.40 a fortnight, for more than a year, while more than 800,000 people are on the disability support pension, which has a maximum basic rate of $788.40 a fortnight for a single recipient.
Porter says the national welfare bill was just $83 billion a decade ago. It currently stands at $154 billion and modelling shows that it is set to increase by more than $120 billion over the next decade to $277 billion a year.
By 2026, welfare spending in today's dollars will be $81 billion more than current tax revenue.
More money is coming out of the welfare bucket than the nation can afford to put in if it is still to underwrite the massive cost of new infrastructure needed to meet the demands of future generations. These are the hard facts. The facts that Shorten and the Greens don't want to address.
When Shorten addressed NSW Young Labor in   October, he told members of the next generation that they deserved "the right to shape the laws and policies that shape your lives".
The issues he included and chose to emphasise were "marriage equality, real action on climate change, the equal treatment of women, youth wages, a better university system, international development and animal welfare".
Homosexual marriage is a non-issue beyond the inner-urban areas of the nation's -cities where the chattering classes dominate the media.
When Shorten mentions climate change, he's referring to the unreliable theory that global temperatures have been affected by mankind.
None of the modelling produced to support this claim has accurately predicted the global climate over the past 30 years.
The women's rights campaign is such a First World issue that the shrill activists can rightly be condemned for ignoring the unfashionable reality of the total discrimination against women in almost all Muslim societies. The sisterhood is essentially white, over-educated and middle-class.
A better university system would see the removal of the leftwing propagandists from the education system.
Youth wages are held back by the socialists, as is international development (unless its funded by taxpaying capitalists), and animal welfare is largely a photo opportunity for activists.
Experienced grown-ups know that good policy may be tough but populist feel-good policy is generally no solution.If young Australians want to enjoy a nation that looks anything like today's when they grow older, they will have to start growing up now.