But for me this is primarily a moral issue. I recently watched a documentary about the reforms pushed through in the late 1980s and early 1990s in New Zealand. One person in that documentary made the comment that New Zealand would likely be paying the price for the cuts made well into the next century. Well, more than 20 years into this century that person has been proved disturbingly correct. Levels of hardship and deprivation have grown, with some periods of plateau, over the decades. The intergenerational effect on wellbeing has been enormous.