Our current coalition government is saying two things at once. It’s sending mixed signals of the most consequential kind. And it’s a problem.
National to India: Come, work, study, and staff our hospitals; we’ll light up the Sky Tower for your Prime Minister.
NZ First to permanent residents (many of them the very people that welcome is courting): we’re moving to take away your vote.
Nobody has to have coordinated this for it to matter.
It could be a total coincidence or a strategic stab from one coalition partner to another. What matters is that the outcome will land on the fastest-growing, most diverse population New Zealand has ever had. Signals about who belongs here and who only gets to work here. It’s very confusing, and the timing of it is hard to ignore.
Kia Ora Modi
On 11 July, a Saturday night, Narendra Modi walked into Spark Arena to a noise Christopher Luxon physically could not talk over. The Prime Minister got to “make some noise for…” and never reached the name, because the arena was on fire. Modi was received in full pomp and ceremony.
This was, by most accounts, the most significant state visit New Zealand has hosted in a generation. It was the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister in four decades. The last one came when Muldoon was in charge. This is not trivial or inconsequential. This is New Zealand rolling out the full carpet for the leader of what is now the world’s most populous country, three months after signing a free trade agreement with it. Modi coming is a huge diplomatic win. Great!
And it was a celebration. For the Indian community in New Zealand, now the third-largest ethnic group in the country, behind Pākehā and Māori, having quietly overtaken the Chinese population at the 2023 census, it was a night that said, “You are a political force; we see you.” Which is lovely. Hold onto that feeling for about ninety seconds.
What happened outside Spark Arena
Outside Spark Arena, more than a hundred protesters gathered, anti-immigration activists among them, chanting “send them back” and holding signs reading “remigration now.” And inside, at the official welcome at Government House, only National Party ministers sat at the table for New Zealand. NZ First’s leader and Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, whose party had spent months trashing this very trade deal, was conveniently out of the country that weekend.
The timeline that could or could not be a coincidence
27 April 2026: New Zealand signs its free trade agreement with India. Todd McClay and Piyush Goyal shake hands in New Delhi, the most significant political achievement of Luxon’s career. The deal opens up a capped stream of skilled work visas, better post-study work rights for Indian graduates, and a working holiday scheme. The whole architecture screams come here and contribute.
5 July 2026: Winston Peters, standing in Warkworth, announces that New Zealand First will campaign to strip the vote from anyone who isn’t a citizen. Permanent residents would lose the franchise they’ve had since 1975. Voting, he said, should belong to those who’ve “sworn allegiance.” Everyone else can live here, work here, and pay income tax here. Just not have a say.
10 July 2026: Modi lands in Auckland.
Peters announced his policy five days before the guest of honour arrived.
The claim I’m not making
Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying NZ First timed this policy to coincide with Modi’s arrival, deliberately, as a dog whistle at the fastest-growing migrant community in the country. That’s too easy: a villain with a motive. But I don’t need that claim. Whether or not anyone planned this, the effect is the same, and it’s worth wrestling with.
Why is this problematic?
Because of our hyper-diverse growing population. Because it is a real threat to our social cohesion.
Social cohesion isn’t a feel-good vibe. It’s not whether we all get along at the barbecue or can hold hands and sing kumbaya. It is a complex social phenomenon, and when it’s disturbed, violence creeps through the cracks faster than you can comment on this post.
National-level social cohesion is paramount: not just for everyone’s safety and wellbeing, but also as the foundation of national security for any country. And NZ First’s direction of travel directly threatens it. And by national level social cohesion, I mean our capacity to coexist with competing and diverse views.
So, think about what these two policies do to a permanent resident, especially one from India, in this case. Message one, from the trade deal and the Sky Tower and the Prime Minister of your birth country being feted at Spark Arena: you matter, you’re wanted, you’re a force. Message two, from a speech in Warkworth: But you don’t get to vote on how any of this is run, and a party in this very government thinks your presence here is a problem to be managed.
So why is NZ First policy a problem for our Indian community specifically?
Because many of them can’t just become citizens to keep their vote, even if they wanted to. India doesn’t allow dual citizenship; it’s written into their constitution. Take New Zealand citizenship and you surrender your Indian passport outright. No going back, just an “Overseas Citizen of India” card that isn’t the real thing. For someone with aging parents, property, or family still in India, that’s a very hard trade-off. It’s choosing between two lives. So, NZ First’s policy catches people whose birth country makes them choose and punishes them for a barrier they didn’t build. If you are not an immigrant or have never ever had to wrestle with deep identity issues, this might seem minor, but believe me, it is not!
This coalition government is essentially saying it wants your labour, your GST, your nurse’s registration but not your vote. Come do the work. Just don’t expect a say in the conditions of the work.
Absolutely not. Every day, no to this!
This is exactly what starts to crack our capacity to coexist across many diverse, sometimes competing views. The kind of disagreement a liberal democracy should be able to handle, just not the way NZ First is going about it. For social cohesion to hold at a national level, people need to believe they belong as influencing members, not as a useful workforce. Strip the vote from permanent residents, and you are formally, legally redrawing the line between the people who count and the people who merely contribute. And you’re drawing it, whether you mean to or not, right through the middle of the community you just signed a trade deal to bring here while asking those same people to come and work and live here. It’s just too much, honestly. WTAF!?
This touches a nerve
So, I still think the policy is xenophobic. I said so last week. What’s changed is that I can now see it sitting inside a pattern: the India deal NZ First opposed as “neither free nor fair,” the migrant “values statement,” the bill to entrench English, and now citizens-only voting. What I see is a clear and problematic direction of travel.
I also know it touches a nerve because last week’s Less Certain ran on my Substack and was reposted on interest.co.nz, and between the two platforms, it drew 116 comments: 76 in one place, 40 in the other. I replied to nearly all of them. The views were passionate and all over the show.
What struck me wasn’t how many people disagreed with me; that’s fine, encouraged, and welcomed. It’s that they didn’t even agree with each other about what the argument was. One crowd said New Zealand is a global outlier on this topic, and we’re just catching up to Australia and the US, who don’t let permanent residents vote either. So that makes it ok because? Another said the whole framing misses Māori sovereignty and that the citizenship oath is sworn to a foreign monarch. Sorry, what? Some wanted to weight votes by tax paid. I’d said permanent residents pay taxes, and that’s reason enough for the vote; a commenter rightly pushed me to be precise (income tax, GST). Fine. Noted. But that’s the point: even the corrections came from completely different directions. Some argued about the definition of mass immigration. Some wanted to talk about infrastructure. There was no shared premise. None.1
And that’s a small snapshot of the state of play: New Zealand has no settled, agreed answer to the most basic question a democracy can ask: who gets to decide? We just have a lot of people who feel very strongly about their version of the answer and a government making consequential moves, mixed and contradictory ones, as though they were separate political moves with no real consequences for folks.
So
I don’t think NZ First drew up this policy as a targeted strike on the Indian community. But I don’t think that matters. What is true is that this government has decided, across a dozen separate decisions that nobody’s bothered to connect, that some people are here to contribute but not influence and some people are here to influence and therefore belong and that you can tell which is which by whether you’ll let them vote.
The trade deal moves through Parliament. The voting policy waits for an election. And a few hundred thousand people who got told they mattered on Saturday are left to work out what it means that, five days earlier, a party in the same government told them they didn’t.
I don’t have a tidy ending for you. I just think that when a country sends two signals this loud in opposite directions, it threatens our capacity to coexist peacefully, and that is worth debating, flagging, and noting, at the very least.
Great piece Natalia. I think - hope - the November election might help filter some of this disparity and turn it into clarity, but I very much doubt we’ll hear cohesive singing of Kumbaya any time soon. I’ve never seen New Zealand this divided in my lifetime. I’ve never experienced New Zealand with such poor political leadership or with so little vision for its future. I’ve never seen a government care so little about its people. In my view, the current coalition is the first to genuinely, deliberately, malevolently, abuse the good intention behind the MMP system of government and you have highlighted just one significant issue, there are countless more examples of open and closing doors. Debate is healthy, unresolved conflict is not so healthy.
There are even scarier questions behind the vote-and-social-cohesion debate. A few years ago, ProdComm estimated that about 300,000 permanent residents, mostly from India and China, could not obtain dual citizenship (due to their country of origin restrictions). It might be closer to double that number by now.
The political behaviour of large diasporas in a small democracy is influenced by the politics of the country of origin. When such countries move away from democracy, amidst polarising geopolitics, the host country needs to pay attention to social cohesion. Large excluded communities can turn against the democratic way of doing things when they have no voice/vote.
New Zealand may need to look at the experience of Russians in Estonia or Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia. The real lesson from these cases is that you have to work hard in the good times to build cohesion and commitment; otherwise, exclusion and resentment may become dangerous in bad times. However, it is also easy to misinterpret these cases and pretend that denying non-citizens a vote avoids dangerous divisions building up in an uncertain future.