Prime Minister John Key today announced a range of policies aimed at targeting the young.

Mr Key told the mostly-late middle-aged audience at the National Party’s annual conference that urgent action was needed to address youth issues.

“We simply can’t go on acting as if there isn’t a crisis,” said Mr Key.

“The fact of the matter is there are too many people in this country being young. We need to move urgently to address this problem.”

Mr Key took the opportunity to announce at the conference a range of policies to incentivise 16 and 17 year olds to leave the country and try their luck elsewhere.

“Those few fools who remain will be punished with a voucher scheme designed to remind them that they can’t be trusted and have no future in National’s New Zealand,” said Mr Key.

“They have a brighter future, but it’s not here.

“And once they’re gone we can finally get on with being the peaceful, decent society we always dreamed of being.

“A society without hiphop music, inappropriate bodily piercings, low-slung pants, and noisy parties going till three in the morning.

“A nation where the only tunes blaring from the stereo of a car will be from The Feelers’ Greatest Hits, and where the only people getting drunk and behaving like idiots will be us at our after-conference functions.

“A nation where the only recipients of welfare will be those on high incomes. We are borrowing heavily to fund their tax cuts, I mean your tax cuts, I mean my tax cuts, but we will not be seeking to control what they spend their money on. If these beneficiaries choose to blow the largesse bestowed upon them on fine wines and the best Cuban cigars then let them do so.”

Mr Key rejected criticism that National’s policies were excessively punitive.

“That’s the same old carping we hear again and again from Labour and Phil Goff. But my question to Phil Goff is this: Are you pressure man or prey? Do you suffer through the gravity?

“Are you predator or prey? Will you suffer my reality?”

The conference concludes tonight with a buffet dinner, followed by a special screening of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen skit.