Prof Marewa Glover
Behavioural scientist
I submitted to the New Zealand government Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Select Committee because I believe the proposed New Zealand–India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) poses a serious threat to our historically established intergenerational majority demographic. New Zealand Europeans, Māori, Pacific Island peoples, and Chinese New Zealanders (hereafter referred to as Kiwis) formed New Zealand, and over the last 200 years we have created a unique blended culture.
Understanding Colonisation
I am a New Zealand citizen born and raised in New Zealand. My grandparents were a Māori man, an Irish woman, a fifth generation NZ European woman, and an English man.
I have taught and authored on the topic of racism and colonisation. In one of my studies on indigenous peoples of the world, I looked at the history of colonisation of 105 countries. This taught me that colonisation has been used by nations throughout human life, sometimes for survival but primarily for economic gain of the colonising group or nation.
Colonisation, the act of one cultural group taking over a country inhabited by another cultural group, has occurred throughout history in one of three ways:
- Forced takeover by war;
- An agreed Treaty or agreement that enables a new cultural group to relocate, grow their demographic to dominance, and change legislation and institutions to match their cultural values and mores; or
- Via stealth – migrating to a target country, growing their demographic to a position of dominance, or powerful influence, and using that position to replace the pre-existing culture of the targeted country to align with their cultural, religious, and business values and preferred way of life.
The Treaty of Waitangi is the agreement that founded modern New Zealand. At the time, New Zealand had been identified by various nations practising colonisation as a resource-rich land mass. France was actively looking to colonise our country. Many iwi chose to enter into a relationship with the British Crown for protection and the benefits that were agreed upon. That Treaty partnership led to the Kiwi culture we treasure today.
The NZ–India FTA increases New Zealand’s vulnerability to the third type of colonisation, colonisation by stealth. Immigration allowances should not be part of any Free Trade Agreement – the word is “Trade”, not ‘Demographic Engineering’. Any Trade Agreement should benefit New Zealand, not lead to a radical cultural shift that generations of Kiwis do not identify with or agree with. Like Japan, New Zealand must protect our unique and treasured culture rather than allow it to be diluted beyond recognition.
This submission is not motivated by racism.
What does racism mean exactly?
Statistics New Zealand’s explicit definition of race is that “race is a biological indicator and an ascribed attribute.” Race is described as something assigned based on biological/physical characteristics, such as skin colour, whereas ethnicity is chosen and cultural.
- Racism is the belief that one’s own race is biologically superior to others, and therefore that some races are biologically inferior.
- Interpersonal racism (actions) may result when that belief leads to a person feeling antagonistic towards and excluding people based on their perceived race.
- Institutional or structural racism refers to policies, practices, laws, or systems that favour one group based on perceived race and consequently discriminates against others not of that perceived race.
Disagreeing with a people’s perceived values, religious beliefs and cultural practices, such as forcing girl children into ‘marriage’, is not racism per se.
Cultural Incompatibility
My concern is entirely about cultural incompatibility and the urgent need to protect New Zealanders and our distinctive way of life.
A stark example of cultural incompatibility is the illegal practice in India where 222 million women and girls were married under the age of 18 — five per cent of whom were forced to 'marry' before age 15, with some 'married' as young as eight to 12 years old: 222 million! This is more than 42 times the entire population of New Zealand. These fundamentally different norms around the protection of girls and young women highlight why large-scale immigration from India through the FTA risks importing practices that clash with core New Zealand values.
Many objections to the NZ–India FTA are expressions of concern about the permanent detrimental effects that rapid cultural change is having on Kiwis. These effects are visible in employment, education, healthcare, and everyday community life.
New Zealand has a proud record of relatively low racism. This was partly due to our three main populations – NZ European, Māori, and Pacific Island peoples sharing common values, shared whakapapa (through intermarriage), and a commitment to a mixed-market liberal democracy that balances capitalism with strong social democratic policies (public healthcare, welfare, public education, and worker protections).
Rapid, large-scale immigration from culturally distant countries is now undermining that cohesion, especially for our young Kiwis who face high unemployment and are being squeezed out of jobs.
The Rapidity of Demographic Change and the Limits of Assimilation
The rapidity of the changing demographics in New Zealand has outstripped the rate at which assimilation to Kiwi culture can occur.
There are many migrants who have been here for decades, even generations. They identify as Kiwis, they are accepted as Kiwis, and they have successfully integrated into our Kiwi culture. But the rapid migration of large proportions of Chinese and Indian people from very different historical, institutional and cultural backgrounds, over a relatively short period of time, their geographic clustering, and clustering in retail, construction, hospitality and a growing number of sectors, is causing many Kiwis to say that they don’t recognise their country anymore.
It feels like the New Zealand that a majority of us were raised in is disappearing. Particularly in Auckland, the people working in the businesses we use on a daily basis are increasingly not Kiwis. The people on the end of the phone when we ring government departments or services are hard to understand because of their heavy foreign accents. Kiwi parents are increasingly choosing to move their children from schools where their own demographic is reduced to a minority.
Many Kiwis have moved overseas; some didn’t want to leave – this is their country. They believe in a New Zealand they loved and that they belonged to.
The pace of cultural change is occurring faster than the pre-existing demography can psychologically adapt to. Related evidence on such rapid changes describes effects on wellbeing through acculturative stress (the strain of adapting to a new social or cultural environment) and neighbourhood disorder theory (where perceived instability, reduced familiarity, and weakened informal norms increase stress). The phenomenon can lead to higher anxiety, reduced sense of control, weaker place attachment, and lower social cohesion. Over time, this can contribute to social withdrawal, heightened perceptions of insecurity, and in some cases poorer mental wellbeing.
Promotion of multiculturalism has failed to assuage the fear and panic an increasing number of Kiwis are feeling as they experience our culture being trivialised and discounted to give effect to the United Nations’ Replacement Migration blueprint.
The proportion of Indian and Chinese nationals has grown to a point where they are no longer small minority groups. The crux of the problem is that their cultures vary in some important ways from the long-standing Kiwi culture.
The Changing Face of New Zealand Businesses
India is a vast continent with a population of over 1.4 billion, made up of diverse sub-groups and tribes that cannot be generalised as the same.
A common outcome when people from cultures with different institutional histories, lower regulatory enforcement, and vastly different economic survival strategies (such as heavy reliance on family labour, and community information and networks) migrate in large numbers into a high-regulation, small-population economy like New Zealand is ethnic economy formation. We are already seeing this compounding in New Zealand, where:
- overlapping but partially separate business ecosystems emerge; and
- strong clustering occurs in entry-level service sectors, construction, roading, hospitality, retail, and other trades and services.
This results in Kiwis, particularly of NZ European, Māori, and Pacific heritage, feeling rejected for roles in more and more sectors because of employer and manager preference for people from their own culture, ethnicity, and networks.
Migrants are often willing to work for minimum wage (or sometimes below) while young Kiwis expect fair pay for skilled work.
Latest Statistics New Zealand figures for the March 2026 quarter confirm the pressure on our young people:
- National unemployment rate: 5.3%
- Māori unemployment: 11.5%
- Pacific peoples unemployment: 11.9%
- European: 4.6%
- Asian: 4.8%
- Youth NEET rate (15–24 years old Not in Employment, Education or Training): 14.4% (even higher for young Māori and Pacific).
Our young people – who were to be the future of our country – are the ones bearing the brunt.
Personal Impact on Young Kiwis
One Auckland North Shore restaurant manager I spoke with directly told me they have almost no Kiwi staff and said, “Kiwis are not applying.” My daughter has experience managing a bar and its staff and holds a duty manager’s certificate. Despite applying for many roles, she has found that hospitality positions are heavily oversubscribed, often receiving 500–1,000 applications. When she has secured interviews, the roles offered no more than minimum wage.
This situation is widely reported by many young Kiwis in the hospitality sector. International students are permitted to work 20 hours per week, and large numbers of recent migrants are willing to accept the legal minimum wage and work conditions (or lower). As a result, employers have little incentive to offer higher rates. Qualified and experienced young New Zealanders are effectively priced out of the industry they trained and worked in.
This represents a breach of the social contract our children were taught at school and at home: get an education, gain work experience, obtain qualifications, and you will be able to get a job and be paid in line with your experience and skills.
New Zealand already has laws against discrimination in employment, yet in practice they are very difficult to enforce against tight ethnic business networks. Once large numbers of temporary visa workers and international students are inside the country through the NZ–India FTA, government regulation and labour inspections can only ever address the worst abuses, such as those highlighted by the migrant exploitation cases that have been found. They cannot stop employers and managers from quietly preferring workers from their own culture who speak the same language, accept minimum wage (or less), and work longer hours without complaint.
Experienced young Kiwi tradespeople with qualifications, student loans, and families to support rightly expect to be paid above the minimum wage. They cannot compete with migrants and students willing to work for the legal minimum wage because their cost-of-living expectations and family obligations are different. The only effective protection for Kiwi New Zealanders is to keep immigration numbers and visa pathways under full sovereign control, rather than locking them into an international treaty that gives one country privileged access to our labour market.
What I Asked the Committee to Recommend
I asked the select committee to recommend that the government:
- Maintain full sovereign control over immigration numbers and eligibility criteria rather than locking future governments into country-specific pathways that risk accelerating stealth colonisation; and
- Remove all immigration-related commitments from the agreement.
I fully support New Zealand First’s call for a mandatory Kiwi values pledge (or values test) for all new migrants and visa holders. All people applying to live in NZ, even temporarily, must explicitly commit in writing to core Kiwi values, including democracy, the rule of law, equality between men and women, freedom of speech and religion, and respect for women and children. For longer stays, they should have to commit to integration into our unique Kiwi culture. Such commitments should be enforceable by law – enabling proportionate penalties, including forfeiture of residency and citizenship, and deportation in cases of serious crimes.
The government is supposed to protect and defend Kiwis and New Zealand. We must not trade away our cultural identity for potential short-term trade gains.
This article was originally published on the author’s X account.
