OPINION:
"Don't be afraid to be a nuisance," Act leader David Seymour urged his supporters when encouraging them to persuade other people to join Act.
It was right at the end of a speech at his party's conference in which National might well consider Seymour had shown he too was not afraid to be a nuisance.
Seymour effectively presented the shopping list he would be taking to the negotiations table should National and Act be able to form a government after the election.
He also delivered a warning that it would no longer have the safety in numbers it had had in its last stint in government when National had three tiny side-kicks in Act, United Future and the Maori Party.
Seymour can see the future, and even though National Party leader Christopher Luxon has claimed back a chunk of voters who went to Act in despair in 2020, the future is not a feeble, emaciated Act Party, dependent on National's voters in Epsom to keep it alive. It is a stronger Act which will almost certainly be National's only option for the numbers to govern.
Seymour would be right.
To emphasise that, he dangled the prospect that rather than go into coalition, Act might be willing to sit on the cross benches instead and make National come to them cap in hand, week after week, to get anything done.
At this point that is simply to appeal to the party's base.
Seymour knows full well that in order for any of his shopping list to happen, National and Act have to be in a position to form that government in the first place.
Playing silly buggers with demands is not the way to achieve that.
in that regard there were signs Seymour has now gone through that transformation forced upon him by the change in leadership from Judith Collins to Christopher Luxon in National.
He has had to switch from portraying himself as a viable alternative to National to get their alienated voters, to his Luxon strategy of pitching Act as a useful and necessary viable support partner to National.
It's an existential conundrum the Green Party has also had to deal with: they are most popular when their larger sibling is weak. But in the end it is better to be polling under 10 per cent with a chance of getting into Government than polling above 10 per cent in Opposition until eternity.
He has to do that without ceding too much ground but without going too far in attacking National.
He has taken the same approach Green Party co-leader Russel Norman did - depicting National and Labour as different shades of black. Norman's usual quote was that one was Pepsi, one was Coke.
NZ First has done the same thing in the past, saying it was the required handbrake on Labour's reforms.
It's the other way round for Seymour, who railed against National for not being reformist enough itself. So rather than say he would be a "handbrake" on National, Seymour is pitching himself as National's stiff upper lip.
He is engaged in that very careful dance of distinguishing Act from National, without torpedoing the electoral appeal of a National-Act Government by going too far.
That was perhaps why much of his list (he said things would be added as time went on) were things that are already on National's own list: the repeal of Three Waters, of the Maori Health Authority, and so on.
Even his supposedly new announcement of an inquiry into the Covid-19 response was something National had hitherto proposed.
There are some differences of degrees but by and large National will be happy.
The biggest exception, and the one identified by Seymour as well, was Act's wish to repeal the Zero Carbon Act. That now has bipartisan support and is a can of worms National will not want to relitigate - Luxon has promoted his own climate change credentials and has more votes to lose by saying they will repeal it than it would get him.
Co-governance is now too major an issue for Act not to include it in its bargaining – and while National has some of the similar views on it, it could be tricky to negotiate.
Seymour's speech focused on the Act staples of law and order, the economy and tax, bureaucracy and co-governance.
He peppered it with humour, noting the irony of the Government trying to fix a problem caused by bureaucracy (the lack of competition in the supermarket industry) by creating more bureaucracy (the Grocery Commissioner). On his new plan to set Inland Revenue to work probing the illegal income of gangs so they could tax it, there was an ad-lib joke about how if they couldn't bring death to the gangs, they could at least bring taxes.
Unlike National's and Labour's, Act Party conferences are more serious affairs – it does not do the standing ovations and families on stage that they do (although Seymour's father, Breen, had driven down through the night after his flight was cancelled).
Instead they listen and clap politely. But those there, including former National and Act leader Don Brash, were more than happy with where Act is going.