ACT's head office has to be a small, up-and-at-'em organisation dedicated to inspiring activity on the ground nationwide, using modest resources with superb efficiency. It involves a party secretary, support, and accommodation. Each of our MPs have their own support staff. Head office cannot hope to match this, but should provide three full-time organisers, on the road, one in the South Island, two in the North.

Among other things, they should train and assist voluntary local organisers in our 61 general electorates across the country to recruit, educate and gear up our grassroots members. Maori people living in an electorate could be regarded as attached to the relevant electorate for voter education and other related purposes.

At present, we have a variety of structures across the country at electorate level. Most common among them is the electorate committee elected by local activists. In some cases, they work superbly. 1n other cases, over time, they have decayed or become moribund. Clearly, wherever that has occurred, it has to be turned round without delay.

In the traditional major parties, most candidates expect to stand two or three times unsuccessfully, often in seats where they have no chance of election, to serve a political apprenticeship. For the majority of future ACT candidates, exactly the same thing is likely to apply.

Act needs to establish some form of candidate apprenticeship (e.g. electorate organisers).

The next ACT Board should consider appointing political organisers for each electorate. They would report to the Board via paid staff. They could be appointed by the Board on the recommendation of paid staff. They would be accountable to the Board via head office full-time staff for party organisation in that electorate. They would be given targets and tasks to achieve. Their track record would be taken into account if they applied to go on the candidates' register. This would in effect create a form of apprenticeship based on practical grassroots achievement, and would assist the Board in its job of list selection.

It would be their job to set up the local structure and education programmes. They should aim to raise at least $10,000 a year in funds net of electorate expenses, establish networking systems, and move towards a standard where ACT has at least one trained person who accepts responsibility for each group targeted of 100-150 houses in the electorate.

This vibrant electorate structure would enable ACT to get its message to the maximum number of people throughout New Zealand.

We have good Members of Parliament in position now for the next three years - a team of quality. They are potentially one of our greatest strengths, but they have a very difficult task. Political, economic and social papers pile up, feet deep, all around them. The danger is that you get swamped by that material. Our MPs sit on select committees, for example. They feel required to swot up every issue in front of the committee. The risk is that day-to-day activity which could never make a significant scrap of difference to ACT can drain away their personal energy and the resources of their support team.

Our MPs need to be very rigorous in their approach. They have to start by asking: "Is what I'm doing what matters most for both ACT and the country?" and stay focused firmly on that. They have to make sure what they are doing is helping ACT's objectives, not somebody else's.

ACT has a special role in the New Zealand political system. It's our job to explain, better and more clearly than anyone else in the country, why and how the policies of the new left-wing coalition, and by National before that, hurt the prospects of the nation, and harm most severely the prospects of low income and disadvantaged New Zealanders.

In my view, at least one-third of this party's research activity should focus on our own ACT policy objectives, and not just on any bill that happens to be in front of Parliament. At least a third of our total parliamentary resource, in terms of people and time as well as dollars, should be devoted in future, to our policy objectives, and selling of our own primary message-not simply responding to someone else's agenda.

We can confidently expect that the new socialist coalition will anger an increasing number of people, and give ACT a lot to respond to, but it will not be enough to look smart at their expense. To the voting public, smart comes across as smart-arse. The cut, the thrust and the parry of the slanging match that pretends to be political debate does not interest or serve the voting public. It is the main reason, along with compromise and obfuscation, why the public hold politicians in such general contempt.

ACT MPs' interest is in identifying the problem the goal, the options, their costs and their benefits to get a grip on what's going to work best for New Zealand, and why. At least half the press statements by ACT MPs in the next three years must focus as an over-riding goal on educating people to understand, on the one hand, the self-defeating fallacies of existing policy, and on the other, why ACT policies can and will deliver.

Our MPs may argue that they are already doing this. Maybe. All I am saying from 21 years of experience in Parliament is this. It is very easy to get side-tracked there into activity that feels important at the time, but produces nothing of value to the public. MPs in my experience fail most frequently because, under the pressure put on them in Parliament, they fail to differentiate between what is important and what is not.

Time is limited. We have to achieve real goals that help ordinary New Zealanders.

Despite all the meetings and speeches MPs make, and the electorate clinics they hold, Parliament is a contagious disease that seeps into the blood, and isolates people from the real world. Faced with continuous conflict, when they move back into the real world, the temptation is to avoid it. They learn how to flatter, evade, make the easy phony case, and how to avoid, above all, the tough issues that test us all most severely. MPs in the same team soon learn to collude with each other to develop evasive strategies of that kind.

My answer to that is very straightforward. Every ACT MP should have a tough-minded personal mentor well-educated, analytic, tenacious, and maybe even pig-headed if necessary, in their attachment to fundamentals. Someone they can talk to openly, without fear, thrash things out, and be coached by. If our own MPs don't grasp fully what ACT is about, and commit to it ahead of glory-busting or personal ambition, then no one else will understand us, and this party will not fulfil the hope we brought to it in joining.

Among the most important roles of our MPs to drive the party forward is to provide help, encouragement and inspiration to ACT electorate organisers. If each MP were to take 5-8 electorates under his or her wing-a large and important responsibility-every electorate organiser would value that assistance, and the new head office setup proposed in this paper would be much more likely to prove effective. Organisers would also be well-placed in that case to assist in the process of evaluating the performance of their MPs.

MPs are the prime motivating force within any political party, and should be used as such.