In Christian Porter, the third Coalition MP to take on the Social Services Ministry since 2013, the complicated portfolio has found itself headed by someone who likes order.

Under his watch, working in conjunction with Michaelia Cash and Alan Tudge, Australia's welfare system will undergo some of the biggest reforms in a generation, implementing recommendations from the McClure review, which has sat largely untouched, since being handed down in early 2015.

The Turnbull government is simplifying the payments system, rolling seven payments into one. But at the same time it is increasing the mutual obligation requirements, using data to identify problem areas, bringing Australia closer to New Zealand's harsher regime.

Welfare recipients who don't take a "suitable" job - which the government has broadly defined as any job which is offered - will have their payments cut, while also seeing their obligations to job hunt increased, or risk seeing their welfare suspended in a "three strikes and you're out" demerit based system.

Of the 700,000 or so people receiving the Newstart allowance, 2258 used substance or alcohol use as the excuse they did not meet their job hunt obligations. Of the 4325 excuses recorded, Centrelink accepted 1351 of them.

But seeing an increase, the government will now use data to identify problem areas, or people, and instigate a drug-testing regime for 5000 new recipients on a trial basis. There are also increased wait times for people with cash in the bank, and older job seekers will need to spend more time looking for work.

Critics who have studied the New Zealand model Australia is basing a lot of its reforms on say while there have been good outcomes, with more people helped into employment, it can also further marginalise some of the most vulnerable within the system.

Sitting in his office, where laminated graphs and tables form a perfectly straight border on the wall behind his desk, Mr Porter said his aim was to change behaviours.

"When we started this process and we looked at both mutual obligation and participation and compliance, we went back and collected every piece of data that we could put inside the system, so we could track what people's behaviours were," he said.

"A lot of this is about trying to engender better behaviours and discourage bad behaviours and it was at that point that we started uncovering groups in the system, not large groups, but significant groups who were falling through the cracks.

"There were thousands of people who were regularly using the fact that they have not turned up to a job interview or other employment activity and regularly using the excuse that they were using drugs or alcohol and in effect those people were getting out of mutual obligation."

Mutual obligation has always formed part of Australia's welfare system, but it's set to increase. And data sets will help the government decide where it needs to come down heavier.

Mr Porter calls it identifying "groups of people who share similar characteristics". Critics call it profiling. At this term, he pauses.

"Well, it's the clever and accurate use of data to tell us who is facing barriers to achieving a better life," he said.

"And once you have actually made that conclusion as to who they are, you can work out what the characteristics are that are causing those barriers and how the system is perpetuating those barriers and how systems can be designed to remove those barriers. That is the process we went through."

He made many of these decisions sitting under a framed depiction of the Peter F Hamilton title Judas Unchained, the second in the sci-fi series the Commonwealth Saga.

That book recounts how the "fractious Commonwealth must unite as never before" having found itself fending off attacks from both within and without.

It could describe the tightrope Mr Porter is attempting to walk as Social Services Minister, with calls from within the party to crack down harder while others outside the government declare it too harsh.

But he refutes that the Coalition is demonising those on welfare.

"That imputes a motive that simply doesn't exist - everything we have done with very broad-ranging welfare reform is designed to create better lives for individual Australians by transitioning them into employment," he said.

"You know what? This has been an area which was largely untouched by the previous government.

"They inherited a very complicated system that wasn't working very well and they didn't do anything like this.

"And what we have seen is areas of the system that are working very poorly, not serving the interests people in the of the system, placing people in a very passive state of receiving welfare, forgetting about them, not helping them.

"We want to make some changes."