Alfred Ngaro was a minister in the Bill English Government. Photo / John Stone
EXCLUSIVE
A former National Party Cabinet minister will tomorrow enter the election fray with a Christian party.
Alfred Ngaro was a minister in the Bill English Government but says none of the political parties running for office this year fully embrace the Christian ethic.
Ngaro admits it’s late to be launching a party but says the plan is to launch it like a rocket.
To a suggestion that his party could drag votes away from National, which he represented for nine years in Parliament, Ngaro was philosophic.
“I haven’t moved from my values. I just feel that the National Party has moved away from some of the values that I’ve upheld.
“We still have a number of things that we hold in common but some of those other core values that make me who I am, I just feel that they’ve shifted from there.”
Ngaro says it’s not about left and right: his party would represent people across the board.
“But right now I believe we’re in a time in which there are more people who care about politics than they ever have before. They just don’t know who to trust,” he said.
“If you talk to people like Nigel Farage and the people internationally, the conversations are no longer about left and right.
“It’s about what’s right and what’s wrong; that’s what people are saying.
“I’m a centrist, that’s where I sit and that’s where I will always sit.
“There are things we have in common obviously with the National Party.”
Ngaro was confident his party will do well despite the short amount of time before the October 14 vote, even scratching up 5 per cent of the vote necessary to get his list MPs into Parliament.
“What I love about being Kiwi is that it doesn’t matter what the odds are. It’s a bit like a David and Goliath sort of thing.
“We run to the giant, we run to the big things that are important. We’re not afraid of that.
“There’s no campaign runway. So we’re going to fire a rocket.”
As for the name of the party, all he would say was that it was appropriate for a Christian political party.
In the first MMP election in 1996 The Christian Party, let by Graeme Capill, collared 4.6 per cent of the vote and in 2014 Colin Craig’s Christian-leaning Conservative Party got 4 per cent of the vote.
Capill in 2005 was convicted of multiple sexual offences against girls under 12 years of age and sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was released on parole in August 2011. Craig resigned as leader of the Conservative Party in 2015 after allegations of inappropriate behaviour surrounding the party’s former press secretary Rachel MacGregor.
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