Nat MP Alfred Ngaro gave the country a reminder of Nat tactics when he threatened Labour list candidate Willie Jackson with losing Government support for his Manukau Urban Māori Authority interest in a charter school and Whānau Ora contract. Being quite so open about it was a PR disaster:
It’s a third-term thing – why Alfred Ngaro hurt National
Alfred Ngaro has apologised to his Cabinet colleagues for his conference blunder. But the damage has already been done. The junior minister delivered a speech at the weekend where he openly bragged about him and his colleagues having the power to punish anyone that bagged the Government by withholding their taxpayer funding.
How can it hurt National? Because it feeds the perception of third-term arrogance and bullying that are the enemy of any third-term Government.
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Ngaro might be sorry now but the circumstances of his original threat – not one delivered il sotto, in a smoky room, but from the stage to a crowded National Party conference – leaves worrying questions over whether his is an isolated view, or reflective of a wider culture among his colleagues. …
Oh it’s a wider culture among his colleagues. National has a long history of this sort of attack, going all the way to the top (and it’s still happening: “Five of nine NGOs contacted by Checkpoint with John Campbell today said they strongly believed being critical of the government could affect their funding.”)
Yesterday, more than a week later, Ngaro grudgingly fronted up with another apology directed mainly at the embarrassment he has caused the Nats. It’s not enough (Bill Ralston of all people):
Nine year itch: What Alfred Ngaro revealed about the National Government
Did Alfred Ngaro accidentally reveal the way the Government controls its critics?
A third-term government is a little like a bad marriage. It all started out lovey-dovey cuddles and kisses and then, by the ninth year, the itch set in with a large dollop of complacency and arrogance.
That may explain the behaviour of Alfred Ngaro, the Cabinet minister whose speech to a National Party regional conference last weekend contained a none-too-subtle threat that the Government would deny funding to individuals and organisations that were critical of them in election year. “If you get up on the campaign trail and start bagging us,” he said, “then all the things you are doing are off the table. They will not happen.”
How any politician could stand up in a forum attended by note-taking journalists and boast about threatening, say, a Maori partnership school or the Salvation Army and still remain a minister is beyond me. His backside should have had a smouldering imprint of Prime Minister Bill English’s boot on it. Instead, he was mildly rebuked and an internal audit made of funding that he had not yet granted or denied during the five months he had held the voluntary sector portfolio. …
English should have fired Ngaro and it speaks volumes that he hasn’t.
See also Alfred Ngaro refuses to apologise for claims media manufactured housing crisis
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