By EUGENE BINGHAM
Act has realised that it is time for a change.
Bruised and battered after a winter of brawling, its two highest-profile MPs have pulled their heads in.
With membership slipping and support in the polls sliding, Richard Prebble and Rodney Hide have bunkered down and signed up to a fresh caucus drive called the "new agenda."
It is about reasserting core Act values to reclaim ground lost since the election.
Something needed to be done.
At a time when National is clawing back Labour's lead, its potential partner in a centre-right coalition government has been bleeding through a combination of self-inflicted wounds and maulings from Prime Minister Helen Clark.
At the time of the March annual conference, Act president and co-founder Sir Roger Douglas publicly tongue-lashed his MPs for their adversarial yet headline-grabbing style.
One - he won't say who but chances are it was Mr Hide - laughed at him.
Eight months on, no one in the party is smiling. They admit that crucial mistakes have been made.
The campaign against Labour MP John Tamihere over the Waipareira Trust blew up in their faces and the handling of the sex allegations against former Maori Affairs Minister Dover Samuels hurt Mr Prebble and impacted on the party.
On top of that, Mr Hide has been ridiculed across the House for his dogged pursuit of Defence Minister Mark Burton, who ordered an Air Force plane to fly a distraught father home from Samoa to be by the bedside of his dying girl.
The plane was loaded with bombs and it was a dangerous mission, yet Mr Hide's outrage was never likely to spread because of the heart-wrenching plight of a distraught dad.
Both Mr Hide and Mr Prebble have lived charmed existences the past few years. It made them think they were bulletproof. And then along came an adept assassin named Helen Clark.
Whether they deserve it or not, she has demonised them for their roles in a string of sleaze scandals from the Samuels affair to Mr Tamihere's forced confession of drink-driving.
Her motivation is simple - destroy Act and the centre-right's ability to govern is severely diminished.
The figures tell the story of this year. Since the election, the party has haemorrhaged hundreds of members and dropped below 5 per cent in the latest polls.
Sir Roger believes a tourniquet of discipline and concentration on core values is needed - no mixed messages.
The trouble is, a party of policy wonks will sink without trace in the news. Mr Hide can ask a thousand questions about the economy and never once make the box at six o'clock, but a single question-time smear campaign and he is plastered across the screen.
Act needs to find tactics and issues that will attract it attention without the flak. Taking a position on the Government's superannuation plans is a good start.
Ideas were thrashed out at last week's three-day caucus retreat, where much soul-searching preceded the launching of the new agenda at the Auckland divisional conference.
The programme involves rolling out a series of policies - accident compensation will emerge this month - and targeting issues that it believes are inextricably linked to Act.
The nine MPs will pepper the House with private member's bills. Three will be up for debate in a fortnight - one from Stephen Franks on parole, another from Ken Shirley on registration of foreign doctors and the other an Owen Jennings' reform of the Resource Management Act.
Crime, red tape and the RMA - if they do not sound like new issues, that's because they are not.
While Act's self-proclaimed relaunch is called new agenda, there is nothing much new about it.
What the party is doing - and desperately needs to do - is wooing back the faithful - the believers who have walked away disillusioned with the behaviour of the past 10 months.
Far from an expansionist programme, new agenda is about reconstructing and consolidating the support upon which Act should be able to depend - reaching out to those self-employed, 40-something married men and their wives and convincing them that the party has not abandoned the foundations of personal freedom, lower taxes and less government.
It is not a decades-old party with a solid core, and with the loss of Mr Prebble's Wellington Central seat, it does not have the safety net of an electorate either.
The other problem is National's rejuvenated interest in Auckland, where half of Act's supporters came from last year. Act must recommit those voters before the big parties' Queen City campaigns begin in earnest.
National watches with interest. It needs Act to shore up the right flank, but not advance towards the centre.
The only thing more damaging for the centre-right than having Act self-destruct would be for it to cannibalise National's vote and spark a feud.
The two parties know they must work together. It will never be a totally harmonious relationship, with some National MPs having no time for their Act counterparts.
But National leader Jenny Shipley and Mr Prebble have a sound working relationship, even if there is residual bitterness over September's public suggestion by Act that National deputy leader Bill English was about to mount a coup.
Speaking of which, how safe is Mr Prebble? Surely with him having been at the forefront of so much of the past months' troubles, he should go to give the party a clean start?
Insiders deny that there is any suggestion he is vulnerable. The caucus is loyal but there is already talk that come the next election Act will be presented as a team, with less concentration on Mr Prebble.
When parties start talking like that, it spells trouble for the leader.
But realistically there are no other options. Mr Prebble is a shrewd, intelligent politician who is formidable, if not attractive. He is also a gifted communicator who will be able to portray the message.
The stakes are high. He is fighting for the political life of both himself and his party.
<i>The week in Politics:</i> It's back to the basics for Act
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