I've been thinking a lot lately about where the next conservative majority will come from in New Zealand. While we've managed to avoid the worst of it, the country will never be entirely immune to forces and trends overseas, which includes some degree of disillusionment with the perceived stagnation of the middle and lower classes. Liberalism is on the wane and various forms of populism are contending to fill its space.

My preference would be for the National Party to get ahead of the curve by embracing a form of responsible populism. That is to say, a non-toxic platform that recognises and seeks to remedy the frustrations felt by ordinary people about the advantages enjoyed by elite groups. Preferably, however, those measures should be justifiable in terms of the party's stated principles.

As it is, there is nothing inherently anti-conservative about adopting a more interventionist stance. To the contrary, while conservatives have always accepted the inevitability of hierarchy they have never, and should never, make an idol of it. A well-ordered society can only exist within a stable community and a community brimming with resentments is inherently unsteady.

It is therefore not so surprising that the first factory acts were passed by conservative governments in the UK and that the early National governments of New Zealand made few moves to dismantle the welfare state instituted by the previous government, This makes perfect sense when you remember that, as Russell Kirk pointed out, "conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata."

With that in mind, I think one thing the National Party should consider is targeting much more tax relief to parents. At present, there is means-tested support in the form of Working for Families and universally available services like state schools and doctor's visits. We could, however, stand to expand direct assistance much further in the form of something like a universal tax credit.

One libertarian objection to this is that such support is tantamount to the subsidisation of child-rearing (or "breeding" as some of them call it). Paying parents would create a distortion that would unduly direct people's efforts towards bigger families and away from more economically efficient things. And maybe they would - though the evidence is doubtful.

But far from being distortionary, state support for parents can very easily be seen as a mild corrective to the existing distortion of superannuation.

This is the largest single component of the welfare system it severs the natural connection between child-rearing and old-age support. For most of history, you usually had to invest in a future generation if you wanted to live without working in your golden years. Now, it doesn't matter how many children you have - or whether you have any at all - the state supports you all the same.

Except the state has to get its money from somewhere. And in the case of funding the welfare system, it is from the income and consumption taxes paid by current workers (or borrowing to be repaid by future workers). So all present workers fund the retirements of present retirees, but those who are also parents have to incur the large costs of raising future workers without any corresponding benefit.

And if that's not a distortion, I don't know what is.

I'm not sure exactly where the level of support should be set or the precise form it should take. To be truly corrective, however, the level of relief would almost certainly need to be set at a level higher than that enjoyed by most parents today.