Welfare review targets jobless, disabled The Abbott government will exclude the age pension and family tax benefits from its review of the welfare system, with Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews indicating he will target unemployment benefits and disability pensions. Warning the system risked becoming "unsustainable," Mr Andrews commissioned former Mission Australia head Patrick McClure to conduct a "broad" review of payments, which were worth more than $70 billion a year. But the age pension - which at $36 billion last financial year accounted for about half of all welfare spending - would not be examined in the review. Kevin Andrews: Targeting unemployment benefits and disability pensions. Nor would the review consider Family Tax Benefits Parts A and B, which cost $19 billion last year, or Mr Abbott's $5.5 billion-a-year paid parental leave scheme. When asked why he was excluding these expensive programs, Mr Andrews said: "This is essentially a limited review ... It's about the normal things, DSP [disability support pension], Newstart, that sort of thing, basically." Cassie McGannon, the Grattan Institute's Australian Perspectives fellow, said it seemed short-sighted to exclude the age pension from the review. "The age pension is the single biggest expenditure that government has," Ms McGannon said. It seems odd that a review of the welfare system - if what you're interested in is budget sustainability - wouldn't take that in. There are big chunks of money under the age pension going to people who are relatively well-off. If we look at what the government pays out under the age pension, about half of it goes to households that have more than half a million dollars in assets. Ms McGannon contributed to a Grattan Institute report released last year that proposed lifting the pension and superannuation preservation ages to 70 to save $12 billion a year. The report said including owner-occupied housing in the assets test for the age pension would save a further $7 billion a year. This would dwarf what savings could be made from the Newstart allowance, which cost $7.5 billion in 2012-13. Ben Phillips, the principal research fellow at the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling at the University of Canberra, said the age pension was likely to grow faster than any other welfare area. He said the age pension was "pretty generous" and an area where greater savings could be found than in unemployment benefits or the disability support pension. "It's probably an area where people aren't doing it as tough as those who are, say, at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the unemployed persons," Mr Phillips said.