Former National minister Alfred Ngaro confident new party will make it to Parliament

Former National cabinet minister Alfred Ngaro has launched a new political party that he’s confident will get into Parliament in October's general election.

Ngaro, the first Cook Islander to be elected to parliament, is the leader of the NewZeal party, which has taken over the Christian values ONE Party that contested the 2020 election but only won 8,000 party votes.

However, Ngaro is undeterred by the low support base he’s working from, or the two months he has left to get his message out to the voting public.

“What makes me confident is that I just know that there's a gap of undecided people,” Ngaro told Pacific Mornings. “If you're looking at all the polling, you'll see it's between 20 and 30%, that's a huge part of our population.”

“It's 150,000 votes to get there, to get into Parliament, that'll give you five to six seats in Parliament … it's not as hard as sometimes we think it is,” he says.

The NewZeal party plans to put up candidates in eight or nine electorates, but they’re yet to announce which seats they’ll be contesting. Ngaro himself will be a list-only candidate.

Ngaro first entered Parliament as a National Party list MP in 2011.

In 2014 he contested the Te Atatū seat for National, losing to Labour’s Phil Twyford but he got back into Parliament based on his 34th ranking on the National Party list.

In December 2016 he became a Cabinet Minister with several portfolios, including Minister for Pacific Peoples.

He was an outspoken MP, especially on issues to do with the definition of marriage, abortion and the end-of-life choice legislation.

In May 2019, there were reports that Ngaro was considering forming his own Christian values party, possibly offering a potential coalition party for National at the 2020 general election.

He was unsuccessful in the 2020 election and finished up his parliamentary career with a dawn prayer on the steps of Parliament.

When asked by Pacific Mornings whether NewZeal would go into a coalition with a National-ACT government if given the opportunity, he says MMP is made for coalitions.

“We've had three years of a one-party rule and I think everyone's come to realise that if you don't have a coalition, then you can't hold bigger parties to account,” says Ngaro.

But Ngaro seemed less enthusiastic about the possibility of joining a Labour-led coalition.

“A lot of that comes down to trust and confidence and at the moment that party, that government, they're losing a lot of confidence with a lot of people and even our Pasifika communities,” he says.

Ngaro didn’t dismiss the idea of a grand coalition with other Christian values parties, but says the challenge is whether everyone can be united and unified with one another.

He also doesn’t believe NewZeal will simply split the Christian values vote and scupper the chances of minority parties getting through.

“Over a million people actually identified as being Christian, there's a lot of votes in there,” he says. “So I think that what we need to be focused on is making sure we get our message out.”

“We are a political party for all New Zealanders, we''ve got a set of values that we think are really important and, we've just gotta be focused on that,” says Ngaro.

He says NewZeal will also be targeting the Pasifika vote because it’s strategically important.

Ngaro says that former Labour prime minister Helen Clark acknowledged during her time that it was the Pasifika vote that got her through in the 2005 election.

“So Pasifika (communities) have a power and especially when you think about one of our cultural capitals is that we know how to mobilise,” he says.

“Our traditional votes have gone to some of the bigger parties but I want our community to ask themselves this question, do they still represent the values that we have upheld for generations?

“Political parties will come and go, leaders will come and go, they can be quite fickle, but what remains the same are our values,” says Ngaro.

“And so, vote your values this election.”