Good morning and welcome

You are here today to begin an entirely new process in the development of New Zealand as a nation.

You are here to begin a process designed to greatly improve, enhance and transform, both the present life and future prospects of every person in this country and what's more, to do so within a relatively short period of time.

Your grandchildren and your great grandchildren, 50 years from now, as they read the history of their country, will be glad and will be proud that you came here today to give that process its primary drive; its initial thrust and motion.

What we intend to launch for New Zealand will place this country at the forefront of the world for gain, at every level of society, in security, opportunity, income, personal and family well-being on a scale we have not before seen in New Zealand, in our lifetime.

Because it takes legislation to initiate the process, that means political action. We are moving our organisation at this first annual conference today, to a higher level of political activity.

During the weekend, every person here will have the opportunity to study and discuss papers covering 25 areas of major policy: education, immigration, forestry, family law, health, international relations, ACC, employment, welfare, local government, tax, Maori development, agriculture, law reform, fishing, communications, defence, Parliament organisation, housing, superannuation, industrial relations, transport, law and order, and the environment.

More than 80 members of ACT, working together in teams of three or four have contributed to those papers. Starting from their personal ideas, with your help today and over the next three months, ACT will finalise the key steps in the action plan we intend to put to the voting public.

Then at a major policy launch in the New Year, ACT will announce a practical programme starting from the next election, for New Zealand to lead the world in policies designed to generate gains in quality of life and living standards, at every level of our society.

What we have to announce will, I believe, transform the way people look at their own personal life, and the prospect now facing their families. It will let ordinary people stand almost immediately in a new kind of future, with potential for them and New Zealand, which they have never before in their lives envisaged.

ACT intends to re-jig the system in this country so that average parents of an average family on the average wage will, after a working lifetime, education for their children, health care provision, and a superannuation package better than National Super today, have half a million dollars in their personal bank account, at retirement.

And that is going to be available to any and every average family on the average wage who wants to achieve it.

Once we put that new system into place, there will not be a voter in the country who wants to walk away from the gains they've made. The benefit to low and middle-income people will be too large and too important for anyone to want it rescinded.

We are talking about the creation of a new kind of climate that is dramatically better for the future of the people of this country. It's fair to say, therefore, that ACT as a party, at the next election, will push the voting stakes up, for ordinary New Zealanders, to levels they haven't so far imagined, for themselves and their neighbours.

Because of the power of this package, we will not be seeking a minor role as a junior partner in some coalition Cabinet dictated by others. We want the whole plan implemented without delay, for the benefit of New Zealand not just a fragment or two of it.

We want a major, not a minor, upgrade in the present prospects of the nation, and we want it now, not five, fifteen or twenty-five years' time. It will, therefore, be ACT's strategy at the next election, to target not five or six percent, but 50% of total popular vote. We are going to put a clear choice to the people of New Zealand.

They can look at the detail for themselves. They can calculate exactly what it means, to themselves or their family. If they like what they see, in less than three years, they can bring it into being.

It is also true to say that, whatever the election vote, the ideas we launch early next year will influence perception and politics from that day onward. Some of those ideas will, I predict, reverberate around the world, and they will, over time, change the way policy evolves beyond the shores of this country.

On these matters, I can speak with some professional authority. I come from a family with three generations of parliamentary experience making policy to guide this nation.

My grandfather was a Labour Minister, and my father a Labour MP. My mother is a person directly in the robust, no-nonsense tradition of people who founded Labour to do a job for the average New Zealander, and for disadvantaged people.

As Minister of Finance from 1984, I personally launched a programme of reform recognised world-wide as fundamental to New Zealand's future prosperity. The confidence of the business community today in the future of New Zealand stems directly from changes that I initiated.

Since then, for the last four years, I've been involved in a dozen countries with carefully picked teams of the best international specialists. It's their task to focus, at the leading edge of global thinking, on what works and what fails in the development of social and economic systems.

I've worked with those people, not just on problems in Australia, Canada or the States, but where poverty is most intense: Russia and Hungary, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan and China.

Let me sum up the lessons I take from those three areas of experience.

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