Only Winston Peters is attuned to the public’s desire to abandon our bonkers voting rights – David Cohen
“Where are we going?” I asked my mother when I was a boy, while being ordered into my best clothes and forced to endure the indignity of a clip-on tie.
My younger sister and I had been told only that we were off to an important occasion somewhere near where we lived in the Hutt Valley, and that fidgeting in the seats wouldn’t be tolerated.
Only when I pestered her did she explain what it all meant.
“It’s my future,” she said.
We were going to her citizenship ceremony, the moment she would formally become a New Zealander.
My Irish mother wasn’t simply collecting an embossed document. She was declaring that New Zealand was where she now lived and belonged. And she was thrilled to be able to cast her first vote — in her case, for Norman Kirk.
I didn’t fully understand it then, but this was my first lesson in an issue New Zealand First has helpfully dragged back into politics.
Winston Peters says the country needs to return to “the basic democratic principle that the right to decide New Zealand’s future belongs to New Zealand citizens”. Now his party wants the law changed.
For many Kiwis, I’d wager — five-get-you-10 — this doesn’t sound terribly radical at all.
New Zealanders are a generous bunch in the main — sometimes beautifully so, sometimes idiotically so — when it comes to calling people our own. But the right to cast a ballot needs to ask for more than our casual habit of welcoming all comers, and Peters, whatever his motivation, is right to force the argument into the open.
A Curia Market Research poll for the Taxpayers’ Union found 59% supported limiting general election voting to citizens. Thirty-two per cent were opposed, while the rest were unsure.
The awkward bit for politicians is where that enthusiasm came from. More Labour, Green, Te Pāti Māori and Act voters favoured the policy than rejected it, even though all four parties oppose the idea. Oh, and the strongest endorsement came from 18- to 39-year-olds, which complicates the easy story that this is just old-timers grousing about new New Zealand.
It’s not hard to see why. Right now, virtually anyone aged 18 or older can enrol if they have lived in New Zealand continuously for just 12 months and aren’t here on a visa requiring them to leave by a certain date.
So: a recent arrival, should they wish, gets a real say in who sits in Parliament or on the local council long before they are eligible to become a citizen. Even though the country asks five years of residence before citizenship, it’s apparently fine with only one year before voting.
This is bonkers.
Not because newcomers have nothing to offer, or because anyone should pretend that a person only starts caring about New Zealand on the day a certificate is handed over, but because the act of voting is different in kind from the ordinary business of settling in and figuring out how the place ticks.
It also sits oddly with the way we otherwise talk about elections. Voting, after all, is not like joining the local squash club or having a strong opinion on the outlandish price of butter.
It’s about, as someone close to the subject once put it to me, our future.
Peters’ case is simple enough. Yes, living here as a permanent resident counts for something; an important point, that. But it shouldn’t be enough to say who sits in Parliament, runs councils or decides referendum questions. For that, he says, citizenship should be the deluxe line.
New Zealand’s current approach has few international precedents. Only a handful of countries give non-citizens comparable voting rights, and New Zealand is looser than almost all of them.
Does this mean that New Zealand somehow has worse democratic outcomes? Of course not. But it does make the country democratically peculiar, because democracy is about process as well as outcomes.
Until 1975, the only non-nationals who could vote in New Zealand elections were British subjects. Since then, the right to vote has become more open and less imperial, which raises the sticky question of what being a New Zealander even means if someone who is not a citizen has the same say in the country’s political future.
Aristotle’s famous definition of a citizen was “one who shares in governing and being governed”. Quoting the Ancients may sound a little grand in the context of a Kelston polling booth, but it still matters.
And the scale is not tiny. According to Stats NZ, roughly one million overseas-born people now live in New Zealand, around a fifth of the resident population. What we do not know is how many enrolled voters are non-citizens, because the Electoral Commission does not publish that figure.
Political pollster David Farrar makes the fairly obvious point that if people can vote without becoming citizens, some will understandably feel less urgency to take that critical final step.
Kate McMillan, a political scientist at Victoria University of Wellington who has written extensively on this subject, puts it more drily. New Zealand’s approach, she says, is both understudied at home and unusual overseas. When non-citizens can vote, parties are “motivated to reach out to immigrant communities because they know that members of those communities will be able to vote”.
Even so, as an entirely first-generation New Zealander, it seems to me the question can’t be kicked down the road forever. If citizenship is meant to mean more than completed paperwork, the vote is the obvious place to prove it. And if that’s not the line, what the dickens is?
We need to have that argument without pretending it’s heartless to draw a line somewhere. New Zealand can surely be a migrant-shaped country while still asking, as most democracies do, that the vote wait until citizenship.
A year’s residence may or may not be enough to feel at home. It is not necessarily enough to help decide the country’s future. I didn’t understand that in the Hutt Valley all those years ago, standing there in my best clothes and clip-on tie. But I reckon I do now.
David Cohen is a Wellington-based journalist and author.
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