A long-running strain inside the governing coalition has flared again, this time over the New Zealand and India free trade agreement, after New Zealand First leader Winston Peters accused National of quietly tightening immigration rules against Indian citizens while telling the public the opposite.
The row burst back into the open as Parliament debated legislation to give the trade deal legal effect. The bill passed its first reading 93 votes to 29 on 25 June, carried by National, Labour and ACT. New Zealand First and the other parties voted against it, an unusual sight for a party that sits at the Cabinet table.
Peters told the House that the government had made an abrupt change of course on migration and was hiding it. “immigration policy settings are being made more restrictive in a way which targets India and India alone,” he said. He claimed officials had warned ministers the changes could damage the trade relationship and might face legal challenge, and that they had discussed not announcing them “for fear of the Indian reaction – this is bad faith”.
He listed four measures he said singled out Indian nationals. They were applying a labour market or economic needs test only to Indians, barring Indian citizens from applying for temporary work visas from inside New Zealand, treating Indian applicants worse on partner and dependent visas, and refusing to let Indian workers count temporary work experience towards residency, a path open to people from other free trade partners.
His central complaint was secrecy rather than the policy alone. “New Zealand First would have preferred that the India FTA not include any migration concessions whatsoever,” Peters said. “But if the government has negotiated such commitments, it is only fitting and proper that it be transparent with India about how it intends to apply them, and in what respects it intends to treat Indians worse than Chinese, Thais, Koreans and nationals from other New Zealand FTA partners.”
Speaking on Morning Report, Peters sharpened the point about disclosure. “How can you possibly in a first-world democracy that’s been going since 1854 have a debate when the details are being kept from the people in the Parliament itself?” he asked. He said he had seen a Cabinet briefing setting out the changes but would not release it himself, citing Cabinet confidentiality, while arguing the public deserved to see it. An Official Information Act request has been lodged for the document.
Trade Minister Todd McClay hit back hard, framing the attack as election-year positioning rather than principle. He said New Zealand First had a record of opposing trade deals and that Peters should “stop promoting misinformation for the sake of getting votes”. McClay pointed to the economic upside of the agreement, saying it delivered duty free access for 57 percent of New Zealand exports from day one into a market of 1.4 billion people.
The deal at the centre of the dispute was signed in New Delhi on 27 April and has not yet come into force. It removes tariffs on about 95 percent of New Zealand exports over time, including kiwifruit, apples, meat, wool and forestry products, although most dairy lines stay behind tariff walls. In return New Zealand drops duties on Indian goods such as textiles, footwear, jewellery, engineering products and vehicles, and commits to investing a large sum in India over the next two decades.
The migration provisions Peters objects to are part of that package. The agreement opens a pathway for up to 5,000 Indian temporary migrants over three years across fields including IT, engineering, healthcare, education, construction, traditional medicine, yoga instruction and cooking. National argues the trade access is worth far more to the wider economy than the migration settings cost, and that the visa rules sit within New Zealand’s normal immigration framework rather than handing Indian workers a special deal.
That is the gap Peters is trying to prise open. National sold the agreement on the promise of broad market access, and New Zealand First says the migration fine print tells a quieter and less generous story that voters were never shown. Both claims cannot be fully true at once, which is why the missing briefing matters so much to the argument.
The clash is awkward for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon with the 7 November election now close. National and New Zealand First need each other to form a government again, yet they are openly contradicting one another on a flagship policy. For Peters the fight has obvious appeal, letting him campaign against immigration concessions and against secrecy while still inside the tent. For National it is a distraction from the export gains it wants to talk about.
Labour backed the bill but has its own questions about transparency, and the wider Parliament will get further chances to test the detail as the legislation moves to select committee. Until the disputed briefing is released, voters are left weighing two flatly opposed accounts of what the country has actually agreed to.
If you want to see where the parties stand on trade, immigration and the issues that matter to you before you cast your vote, you can compare them with our voting tool.
What do you make of the standoff? Should the Cabinet briefing on the India immigration settings be made public, and does a coalition partner have the right to vote against the government’s own trade bill? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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