Natalia Albert argues NZ First's voting rights policy is both xenophobic and a waste of everyone's time

By Natalia Albert*

NZ First will have a policy where only citizens of New Zealand can vote. Currently that right is extended to everyone with permanent residency. So, I'll unpack what the current rules are, the difference between permanent residents and citizens, including a plethora of reasons why some folks stay permanent residents during their whole time in New Zealand, what NZ First is suggesting, and why this is all so problematic.

This is an incredibly xenophobic political move as well as a super impractical one, it's a total waste of time. Identity politics aside, it's an inefficient way for politicians to spend their time and money, especially a party that holds serious portfolios and has priorities far more pressing to our day to day lives than whether permanent residents can vote or not. Send help!

Also, I am an overseas born New Zealand citizen, so I have some skin in the game here, and a chip on my shoulder about how migrants, especially brown and black folk from non-English speaking countries, are treated in New Zealand.

Because let's drop the pretence that we are inclusive and kind. New Zealand is categorically not an easy country to live in if you're not white or white passing, and that stands as fact, I'm not here to debate it. If you're brown, black, or middle eastern looking and sounding, you will face more barriers to find work, get a promotion, and build social capital than white passing folk. A fact.

So back to this stupid policy.

What are the current rules?

Right now, you don't need to be a New Zealand citizen to vote here. You need to be 18 or older, have lived in the country continuously for 12 months or more at some point in your life, and be "a resident for electoral purposes." That last bit covers anyone lawfully in New Zealand who isn't required to leave by a set date, which includes permanent residents and some longer-term visa holders.

This is law since 1975, when the law was widened from "British subjects" to include permanent residents regardless of citizenship. Fifty-one years of precedent, not some woke oversight nobody's noticed. Roll eyes!

Now, what is NZ First suggesting?

Winston Peters announced the policy on 5 July at a public meeting in Warkworth: NZ First would campaign to restrict voting in general and local elections to citizens only. His framing was that voting "should be a privilege of those who have sworn allegiance to New Zealand, and who have made the commitment to make New Zealand their home and their future."

His follow up line does is the real gem: "If you haven't made that commitment or sworn that allegiance, we are happy to let you live here permanently, but why should you get a say in how this country is run or governed?" – Because they pay taxes Winston! Simple as that. Will you except permanent residents from paying taxes? Didn’t think so.

His speech questioning why a permanent resident should be able to vote "after a couple of years," and asking whether letting non-citizens vote in referendums that "fundamentally change the social fabric of our society" is really what we mean by democracy. It’s not, it’s actually the opposite.

This is one line in a run of NZ First moves this year: trashing the India NZ trade deal over immigration numbers, a "values statement" for migrants, a member's bill to entrench English as an official language. Whatever you think of the individual merits of each, the pattern is consistent, and this policy sits comfortably inside it. And they are all a waste of time and totally immaterial to our day to day lives.

Permanent resident’s vs citizenship

This is where the policy falls apart on its own terms, because it treats "hasn't become a citizen" as a proxy for "hasn't committed to New Zealand." That's just not true, for a long list of very ordinary reasons.

Start with the big structural one: dual citizenship. New Zealand allows it. Plenty of the countries our permanent residents come from don't. China, India, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia are the obvious examples, roughly 50 countries in total restrict it.

If you're Indian and you take New Zealand citizenship, you surrender your Indian passport outright, full stop, and can only fall back on an Overseas Citizen of India card, which isn't real citizenship. For someone with ageing parents, property, or family still in the country of origin, that's not a paperwork inconvenience. It's a genuinely hard trade-off between two lives, not a failure of allegiance to either. This is a big deal. I have New Zealand citizenship became I didn’t have to surrender my Mexican one, but if Mexio didn’t allow it, I would have not taken the leap.

Then there's the oath. Citizenship ceremonies require swearing or affirming allegiance to the monarch. For plenty of migrants, particularly from countries with their own complicated colonial history, that's a real sticking point, not administrative friction. And they are entitled to not choose that. They still pay taxes Winston!

Then there's simple bureaucratic inertia. People who arrived decades ago, when the distinction barely mattered because permanent residents could already vote, work, and build a life here, and who just never saw the need to formalise it. Older migrants especially. There's no democratic deficit in someone who's paid tax and voted here for 40 years suddenly being told the bit of paper they never needed now disqualifies them.

And there's cost and process. Naturalisation requires five years of residence, 240 days physically in the country each of those years, English language proof, a character check, and as of November last year, a $560 application fee for an adult, up 19% in a single hike after 22 years untouched. None of that is unreasonable as a bar to citizenship on its own. But it means "hasn't become a citizen yet" captures people mid process, people who can't clear the physical presence test because of work travel or caring for family overseas, and people for whom the cost is a genuine barrier, all lumped in with Peters' implied category of people who simply refuse to commit.

Permanent residence already means someone has been through character checks, health checks, and often years of temporary visas before qualifying. It's not a lesser or looser status than citizenship, it's a different one, with different legal weight. Peters' own framing concedes this when he says permanent residents get to "live, work, study, and build a life" here, then argues that's somehow not commitment enough to have a say in how that life is governed.

The politics of voting restrictions

Restricting who gets to vote has never been about principle. It's about who gets to keep control of outcomes. And it’s a political issue that goes back forever, and it happens in all post-colonial democracies. Franchise rules are drawn by whoever currently holds power, and they tend to move in whichever direction protects that power. Expansion happens when letting more people in defuses a bigger threat. Restriction happens when the reverse calculation kicks in, when there's a fear of losing control over outcomes.

New Zealand loves telling the 1893 story, first country in the world to give women the vote. What gets left out of the primary school version is what happened to Māori voters in the same democracy. Māori didn't get a secret ballot until 1938, 45 years after women's suffrage. They voted on a separate day from everyone else until 1951. And there were no electoral rolls at all for the Māori seats until 1949, because officials argued, in so many words, that compiling them was too difficult given "language, literacy and proof of identity." Not a lack of political will. A framing of the people in question as too complicated to properly count. This is still a case for giving prisoners voting rights and under 16s. Same thing.

None of that is ancient history. And Peters is carrying on this shitty legacy, just aimed at a different group: define a category of resident as not quite ready, not quite trustworthy, not quite committed enough, and dress the restriction up as protecting the integrity of the system rather than narrowing who's allowed to shape it. Restricting a franchise has never once in this country's history been about principle in the abstract. It's been about which group currently holds power deciding who else gets to have a say in keeping it. So when Peters says he wants to "restore" a democratic principle, he doesn’t.

Why it's such a waste of time, ignoring the incredibly loud xenophobic tones it has

Set the xenophobia aside for a second, though we'll come back to it, and look at this as pure political triage. NZ First holds real portfolios right now. Peters is Foreign Minister, Racing Minister, and Rail Minister. Deputy leader Shane Jones runs Oceans and Fisheries, Regional Development, and Resources. These aren't quiet backwaters, and there's no shortage of pressing work sitting on those desks.

None of that is what's getting the airtime. Instead, we get a policy that, if you listen to the framing, sounds like a constitutional crusade against an entrenched provision needing 75% of Parliament or a national referendum to shift. Here's the thing: it might not need either. The Supreme Court has already read down the entrenchment clause covering electoral qualifications, finding it locks in only the voting age of 18, not the citizen or permanent resident test sitting right next to it in the same section. Legal academics still call the whole doctrine's enforceability unsettled. But the practical read is that this could pass on a bare majority, no referendum, no supermajority theatre required.

Which makes the "restoring democratic principle" framing even flimsier, not more solid. This isn't a lonely stand against an immovable constitutional wall. It's a policy that's genuinely achievable, wrapped in language that makes it sound like a heroic uphill fight, aimed at a group of voters nobody, including NZ First, appears to have actually sized up. There's no public breakdown anywhere of how many permanent residents are even on the roll. They're picking a fight over a category of voter whose scale they haven't bothered to establish.

So, what's it actually for? It's a policy that costs nothing to promise and buys a very specific kind of attention. Electoral law barrister Graeme Edgeler has made the useful point that New Zealand does sit at the open end of a global spectrum on this, Australia and the US are citizens only, the UK lets some Commonwealth citizens vote, and Europe splits access between national and EU elections. There's a real conversation available about where New Zealand should sit on that spectrum. That is not the conversation NZ First is having. The conversation NZ First is having uses the word "allegiance" a lot, and points, not especially subtly, at exactly which permanent residents it thinks haven't earned a say.

That's the waste. Not the hours spent on a bill that might actually pass. The opportunity cost of a party with genuine levers over foreign policy, resources, and regional development choosing to spend its political capital re-litigating who gets to belong here, instead of using it on literally any of the portfolios it already holds.

*Natalia Albert is a political scientist living in Wellington exploring how to govern divided societies in diverse, liberal democracies, with a focus on New Zealand politics. She writes weekly on her Substack, Less Certain. Albert stood as a TOP candidate in the 2023 election.