A fundamentalist New Zealand preacher claims he predicted Monday’s earthquakes a day before they hit.

In a sermon on Sunday (13 November) Brian Tamaki, head of the Pentecostal fundamentalist Destiny Church, blamed homosexuality, murder and other sins for natural disasters.

A video of his speech was posted to Destiny Church’s Facebook page on Sunday, followed by a blog post published on Wednesday (16 November), in which Tamaki claims to have predicted the event.

He made his claims a day before the quake, which killed two people, left thousands stranded and triggered a tsunami warning, hit.

Quoting Leviticus, which states earth ‘convulses under the weight of certain human sin’, he said catastrophes were home-made in Christchurch.

He picked the city because it’s ‘the best name you could call any city in the world’, because its name consists of ‘the two great things on earth’.

But for Tamaki, the city doesn’t live up to that, which is why he said it was hit by the quakes.

‘That city was everything but Christ’s church. Even the churches there were allowed all sorts of activity you wouldn’t even dare to imagine,’ he said.

‘Because there were churches there [in Christchurch] that weren’t churches.

‘They were actively involved in homosexual practice, homosexual priests.’

He also claims Christchurch to be responsible for same-sex marriage in new Zealand, although the country’s government sits in Wellington, because an unnamed politician flagged it up.

‘He was brought from England from a radical gay group who tried to radicalize homosexuality,’ Tamaki said.

‘Oh sorry, try to get the Lord and government of England to be the first country to accept gay marriage but they were turned down.’

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, John Key, called the claims ‘stupid’, saying it was ‘madness’ to blame gay people.

The facts of life are New Zealand is a seismically prone country, with a number of very well identified fault lines,’ he told 9News.

‘We’ve been a bit unlucky I think, clearly those plates are moving around a bit.

‘It’s nothing to do with people’s sexuality. I mean, it’s just madness.’

Other Christian institutions also condemned Tamaki’s claims and said disasters were definitely not God’s way of punishing humanity.

‘If that was the case, if you followed that to its logical conclusion, a baby dying of cancer would be somehow sinful,’ Auckland vica Helen Jacobi told 9News.

‘And that’s ridiculous. It’s just completely illogical.’