Summarised by Centrist
New Zealand allows some migrants to vote years before they are eligible to become citizens, an arrangement journalist David Cohen describes simply as: “This is bonkers.”
Writing in the NZ Herald, Cohen backs NZ First leader Winston Peters’ push to restrict voting in general and local elections to New Zealand citizens.
Under current rules, most adults can enrol after living continuously in New Zealand for 12 months, provided they are not on a visa requiring them to leave by a specified date.
Citizenship, by comparison, generally requires five years of residence.
Cohen argues that makes New Zealand highly unusual internationally. Only a small group of democracies allow non-citizens comparable voting rights, and New Zealand’s rules are more permissive than most of them. Its current approach, he writes, has “few international precedents”.
Public opinion also appears to lean towards change.
A Curia Market Research poll for the Taxpayers’ Union found 59% supported limiting general election voting to citizens, while 32% opposed.
Support crossed party lines. More Labour, Green, Te Pāti Māori and ACT voters supported citizenship-only voting than opposed it, despite those parties rejecting NZ First’s proposal.
Perhaps more strikingly, the strongest support came from 18- to 39-year-olds, undercutting the idea that the proposal is driven mainly by older voters uneasy about immigration.
Cohen stresses that the argument is not about whether migrants contribute to New Zealand or care about its future. Rather, he says voting is different from simply living, working and paying taxes in a country because it determines who governs, who controls councils and how referendums are decided.
The issue is increasingly significant in a country where around one million residents were born overseas, roughly one-fifth of the population. The Electoral Commission does not publish how many enrolled voters are non-citizens.
Cohen argues citizenship should remain meaningful and that requiring it before voting need not conflict with New Zealand’s history as a migrant society.
“New Zealand can surely be a migrant-shaped country while still asking, as most democracies do, that the vote wait until citizenship.”
Re-published from the Centrist with permission
