ACT Party leader David Seymour. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
ACT Party leader David Seymour says there needs to be political stability to have intelligent policy change and that means starting negotiations early.
About half a million special votes are yet to be counted with some electorate seats still waiting on the final results.
National's Christopher Luxon has confirmed he would work quickly to form a coalition with ACT.
It remains unclear whether the National Party and ACT will need to strike a deal with New Zealand First to form a government.
Seymour said both ACT and National have continuously said their preference was to work with each other.
But they needed to balance respecting the votes that had not been counted yet while also ensuring they were ready to hit the ground running, he said.
"The more work can be done before then to make sure that there's some agreements between parties so that we have not only change but political stability to start implementing the policy changes that are required so that New Zealanders can actually have a bit of room to breathe at the end of the week financially, safer streets," he said.
Part of that work would mean meeting over the next few days to discuss what a tentative arrangement would look like, common ground and sorting out logistics, Seymour said.
"We believe, and I think National believes to some extent that the size of government expenditure has been too large for the results that it's delivered, and as government has done less with more, households have been constantly stretched to do more with less.
"There needs to be a rebalancing there between consumption by the public sector and consumption by households and businesses because the latter are really hurting."