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The problem is in fact worse than most people assume. Notwithstanding the 250% tax hike of the last 30 years, successive New Zealand Governments managed to out-spend even that enormous rise in their annual revenue.

The Government has during that period, accumulated public debt, liabilities imposed on future taxpayers, vastly in excess of any figure the politicians have so far been willing to confess to you.

$40 billion classified in the budget as public debt, about $11,430 a head - that's money we owe to bond-holders who have put up their own real cash in the past to help fund deficit spending. And it costs you, the taxpayer, $2,800 million a year in interest alone, about $800 a year for every man, woman and child, to fund that debt.

Now let's add to that sum what you are committed, as taxpayers, to find every year to fund superannuation for those who currently live in retirement. Over the period from now until those people die, that obligation will cost you, the taxpayer, $100 billion. The budget may not call it debt, but that's exactly what it is.

That debt costs the taxpayer $6,500 million a year that, together with our debt to bondholders, takes the total annual cost up to more than $9,000 million. Right now, these debts cost the average New Zealand family no less than $9,000 dollars every year. No wonder so many families find saving a practical impossibility.

Beyond that we have another two million people or more currently aged 18-64 due to retire in the future. An obligation is clearly on the State to look after them in old age, much as it looked after previous generations in the past.

Certainly, some margin exists for a future Government to short-change them by reducing present superannuation levels but unless those people can entirely support themselves in retirement, there is no way the community can walk away from the whole of its obligation to them.

After all, as we have seen, given the present tax burden, huge numbers of those people have nil or very limited capacity to save for their old age.

Assuming that whole group is on average, halfway through its working life at present, we calculate that additional debt at $155 billion.

Now we begin to see why the average New Zealander, already seriously impoverished relative to other countries by the inefficiencies of the past 40 years, can expect, notwithstanding improved growth, to remain poor for a long time to come. Every one of us has a hidden burden hung around our necks in New Zealand of $84,000 on top of anything they know they owe for their home, their car, their boat or their furniture.

The new baby born this morning inherits its $84,000 share of that debt before we put on its first pair or nappies. In New Zealand the way we run it today debt is your primary birthright. That problem is absolutely central to the social crisis in New Zealand. Until it's solved, it will remain difficult to make real progress on a wider front.

Two years ago, in a book called "Unfinished Business", I pointed out that solving those debt problems would have dramatic consequences.

The savings to the State and the taxpayer would be so huge that you could abolish income tax entirely while still radically improving the social outcomes available to low and middle-income New Zealanders.

That book, in fact, laid out a 20-year programme designed to eliminate the debt burden, liberate the taxpaying public from income tax, give parents the voice they need in education, place patients at centre stage in the health system, provide real, reliable income security in retirement and at the same time, preserve and enhance the position of low-income people while at the same time providing them with new incentives capable of liberating them from lifelong dependency on the State.

Community interest in those ideas was a key factor leading to the formation of ACT New Zealand.

Twenty years is, of course, a long programme. How do you convince other people that any 20-year programme can possibly weather, for example, repeated changes of Government? What credibility does any such programme really have?

The answer is, let's be frank, not a lot and credibility is a fundamental consideration. So ask the impossible question. Is there, in fact, any way such changes could be made in a single term of Parliament?

If the answer is yes, then why not in year one of that term?

In short, bring it right up-front. Make it totally clear to every voter in New Zealand that this is not theory, it is real, it is immediate and it is absolutely practicable. It is ACT.

This is the essence of the ACT answer:

For example:

If we can do that, then we change the whole ballgame.

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