New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says only New Zealand citizens should be allowed to vote, setting up one of the sharper constitutional arguments of the campaign as the country heads towards the general election on 7 November.
Peters announced the policy at a public meeting in Warkworth on Sunday afternoon, telling supporters his party would move to change the law so that the right to choose a government belonged to citizens alone. It is a campaign commitment rather than government policy, which means it would only take effect if New Zealand First returned to Parliament after the election and could win the numbers to change the Electoral Act.
Under the current rules, permanent residents and other lawful residents can vote once they have lived in New Zealand continuously for 12 months or more, provided their visa does not require them to leave by a set date. That covers permanent residents and many people here on work or study visas. New Zealand citizens living overseas keep their vote for a period after leaving, and the residency test for non-citizens sits alongside the same broad eligibility rules published on the official Vote NZ website.
Peters wants to end that arrangement. According to a report from RNZ, he said voting “should be a privilege of those who have sworn allegiance to New Zealand, and who have made the commitment to make New Zealand their home and their future”.
“If you haven’t made that commitment or sworn that allegiance, we are happy to let you live here permanently, but why should you get a say in how this country is run or governed?” he said.
“New Zealand First will restore the basic democratic principle that the right to decide New Zealand’s future belongs to New Zealand citizens.”
Peters drew a line between residency and citizenship, saying permanent residence granted the right to live, work, study and build a life here, while citizenship was “the formal bond of allegiance, belonging, responsibility, and democratic authority”. That distinction, he argued, “should matter again”.
His speech notes went further, questioning why a permanent resident who had come through the normal application process should be able to vote at all after a couple of years. “They can vote on who the government is, they can vote on who the local council is, they can even vote in referendums that would fundamentally change the social fabric of our society,” he said. “Is this what we really mean by democracy in our country?”
New Zealand is unusual in letting non-citizens vote in national elections. The franchise was widened in 1975 to include permanent residents whether or not they held citizenship, replacing an older rule that tied voting to being a British subject. Around the same time, countries such as Australia and Canada moved the other way, settling on a citizenship-based model that most nations adopted as they wrote their own electoral laws through the second half of the twentieth century.
Barrister Graeme Edgeler, a frequent commentator on electoral law, told 1News and other outlets that Australia and the United States allow only citizens to vote, while the United Kingdom still lets some Commonwealth citizens cast a ballot. In parts of Europe, he noted, foreign residents may be shut out of national elections but able to vote in European Union ones. In other words there is no single global standard, and New Zealand simply sits at the more open end of a wide range.
The policy fits a pattern for Peters, who has spent the year pushing back on immigration settings and has also criticised changes to migration rules linked to a trade deal with India. Restricting the vote to citizens gives New Zealand First a clear identity marker heading into the campaign, one that separates it from its coalition partners and speaks directly to the part of the electorate that worries about the pace of population change.
Whether it could actually happen is another question. Changing who is entitled to vote goes to the heart of the Electoral Act, and some parts of that Act are entrenched, meaning they need either a 75 percent majority in Parliament or a majority at a referendum to alter. The residency rule for voters is not one of the entrenched provisions, so in theory a simple majority could change it. But it would still need the support of whatever government forms after November, and neither National nor ACT has committed to the idea.
The announcement lands in an already busy year for electoral change. In December 2025 Parliament passed the Electoral Amendment Act 2025, which closed enrolment 13 days before polling day, banned all prisoners from voting and lifted donation disclosure thresholds. That law was backed by National, ACT and New Zealand First and opposed by Labour, the Greens and Te PΔti MΔori, who called it voter suppression that would fall hardest on younger and lower-income people. A move to strip the vote from permanent residents would almost certainly split the House along the same lines.
For the hundreds of thousands of people who hold permanent residence but have not taken up citizenship, the stakes are personal. Many have lived here for years, pay tax, raise families and send children to local schools, yet under Peters’ proposal they would lose any say in who governs the country until they naturalise. Supporters of the change say that is exactly the point, and that citizenship should be the price of a vote. Critics say it would push a large group of settled New Zealanders to the margins of a democracy they already help pay for.
With the election now four months away, expect voting rights to become a live campaign issue rather than a technical footnote. If you want to see where the parties stand and work out who best matches your own views before you head to the ballot box, you can use our voting tool to compare their positions side by side.
What do you think, should the vote be reserved for citizens only, or is long-term residence enough to earn a say in how the country is run? Share your view 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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