What politicians say about "Kiwi values"
In the absence of a formal Values Statement, the only public articulation of what New Zealand values "are" comes from ministerial statements. Quoted in their own words, dated, and sourced.
Brooke van Velden — Internal Affairs Minister (ACT)
Announcing the test on 6 May 2026, the minister responsible for the policy framed the values being tested as follows:
"Becoming a New Zealand citizen is a significant milestone in a person's life and a great honour. This change reinforces the value of New Zealand citizenship, and what it means to obtain it."
In a follow-up statement reported by RNZ on 7 May, the minister said the test would ensure people understood "the values of democratic freedoms" that made New Zealand "wonderful". She also confirmed the test would be "in place by the second half of 2027" and that officials would "provide guidance and other resources in advance".
Christopher Luxon — Prime Minister (National)
Asked about the test on RNZ's Morning Report on 7 May 2026, the Prime Minister offered the following framings:
"On balance, it's very similar to what Australia and UK has been doing for years."
The Prime Minister also said the scheme would be self-funded, that it should not harm skilled migrants seeking citizenship, and — more pithily, on whether to take the test — "you could take it or leave it."
David Seymour — ACT Leader
ACT, the coalition partner that holds the Internal Affairs portfolio, claimed the announcement as a long-standing party policy victory. Seymour's framing emphasises legal equality:
"Nearly a decade later, ACT has got it over the line."
Winston Peters — NZ First Leader
NZ First leader Winston Peters used the party's 2025 conference to push for a "Kiwi values" pledge from new arrivals — the first time the phrase had been put forward in this context by a coalition leader. Peters's framing differs notably from the rights-and-freedoms emphasis favoured by van Velden, Luxon and Seymour, leaning instead on cultural conformity:
Chris Hipkins — Labour Leader
The opposition Labour Party's leader signalled qualified openness to a citizenship test on the day of the announcement, with one explicit condition: te Tiriti o Waitangi must be in it.
In response, Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden told RNZ that the test would include one question on the Treaty — a single item out of 20. Hipkins said Labour would release a full immigration policy closer to the November 2026 general election.
Green Party and Te Pāti Māori
At the time this site was last updated, public searches did not surface specific statements from the Green Party or Te Pāti Māori responding to the citizenship test announcement of 6 May 2026. The two parties have been vocal on related immigration and te Tiriti issues throughout the term — including last year's Treaty Principles Bill and the 2025 passport redesign — but a direct response to this particular policy was not yet on the public record.
This page will be updated when statements from either party become available. If you have seen a public response from either party that should be included here, please use the contact form with the source.
What others are saying
Politicians are not the only voices in this debate. Civil society organisations and legal commentators have raised distinct objections — focused not on the framing of values, but on whether a test for them is necessary or fair.
Anu Kaloti — Migrant Workers' Association
The president of the Migrant Workers' Association of Aotearoa, representing those most directly affected by the proposed test, was sceptical of its premise. Her objection focused on the existing layers of vetting that visa applicants already pass through:
By the time people are ready for citizenship, Kaloti said, they had already been through different tests, multiple times, for various visas — including English-language requirements, character checks and health checks.
Migrants and refugee advocates
Reporting by RNZ on 7 May 2026 captured the views of people directly affected by the proposed test — both migrants currently weighing whether to apply for citizenship before the test takes effect, and an advocate representing a community for whom an English-language multi-choice test poses particular accessibility challenges.
Victor Wang — Wellington, fourteen years in NZ
Wang, a Chinese permanent resident, told RNZ he had been undecided about applying for citizenship because doing so would mean giving up his Chinese citizenship — China does not allow dual nationality. The new test has tipped him into applying now, before it takes effect:
Wang also questioned the multi-choice format itself, saying it leaves room for guessing and ignores writing and speaking ability, and suggested exemptions for people with long residence or local education.
Ankit Sikka — Auckland, ten years in NZ
Sikka, who came to New Zealand from India about ten years ago, plans to apply as soon as he meets the five-year presence requirement, in part to avoid the test:
Behaviour during years of residence was a stronger proof of being a good citizen than memorising material for an exam, Sikka argued. He suggested e-learning modules as a more useful alternative, and warned about the test's effects on people with different learning abilities.
Jeremy Li — Auckland
Li, also a permanent resident planning to apply, was supportive of the test in principle but raised the language question. He told RNZ that values-based knowledge should be testable in languages other than English — Chinese, Japanese, Korean and others — so that migrants could answer in the language they were most comfortable in. Recognising the country's values matters, he said, but so does being able to engage with the question.
Judah Seomeng — ChangeMakers Resettlement Forum
Seomeng, originally from Botswana and now general manager of a refugee support organisation, raised the most pointed accessibility concern. The people his organisation works with often face serious language barriers, and some are not literate even in their first language:
Seomeng said he was waiting to see what language support would be built into the test — but expected some refugees would fail it.
The critic's view
Not all of the public response has been supportive. Immigration lawyer Pooja Sundar, quoted by RNZ, called the proposal a misdiagnosis — she questioned whether existing New Zealand citizens were failing to share these values, and whether there was any evidence that knowing them produced better citizens:
Sundar made a sharper political point as well: that the three coalition parties themselves disagree publicly on what New Zealand's values are — pointing to the friction between National, ACT and NZ First over Treaty interpretation, the failed Treaty Principles Bill, and other contested cultural questions. If the country's own elected leaders cannot agree, she argued, what exactly is being tested?
The editorial view
The Otago Daily Times — Dunedin's regional daily — examined the proposed test in an unsigned editorial on 8 May 2026, two days after the announcement. The piece accepted that New Zealand was not an outlier in this respect, noting that the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia all require something similar of citizenship applicants, then raised two structural objections.
The first concerned testing itself:
The second objection was that the proposed topics were not as straightforward as they sounded. The editorial noted, for example, that section 5 of the Bill of Rights Act 1990 qualifies the Act's rights and freedoms by reference to "a free and democratic society" — a phrase the Act itself does not define — and suggested that many New Zealand-born citizens would struggle with detailed questions on topics of that kind.
The editorial closed by suggesting the test was being imposed for the benefit of those who wanted it, rather than for the people who would have to sit it — landing in much the same place Pooja Sundar had two days earlier, but from a centre-of-the-spectrum regional editorial voice rather than a legal-professional one.
The academic view
The most substantive expert analysis to appear since the announcement was published in 1News on 13 May 2026, written by Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa — Massey University. It raised two points that the political debate had largely bypassed.
The first was methodological. Shaw drew on international research to challenge the premise that a test of this kind achieves its stated purpose:
The second point concerned what the test would leave out. Shaw observed that when Australia toughened its citizenship regime, indigenous understandings of citizenship were absent from its "Australian values" test. The British test has been criticised on similar grounds in relation to the legacy of imperialism. He argued the same risk applied here: a test that omits what is inconvenient may amount to selective historical amnesia rather than a genuine account of what New Zealand is. In Shaw's framing, what does not appear in the test will matter every bit as much as what does.
From Māori media
Waatea News — a Māori radio station and news service — published a commentary by Matthew Tukaki on 9 May 2026 framing the test as one of the most politically charged immigration debates in recent years. The piece focused on a constitutional question the mainstream commentary had not centred: in a nation founded on te Tiriti o Waitangi, any citizenship framework that fails to properly centre te Tiriti risks reinforcing a narrow, colonial understanding of national identity. Tukaki noted that for Māori, citizenship is not only about law and policy — it is also about whakapapa, belonging, and the ongoing question of who defines what it means to be a New Zealander.
No formal statement on the citizenship test from Te Pāti Māori or the Green Party has been located at the time of writing. This page will be updated if either party publishes a direct response.
What is — and isn't — in these statements
Read together, the ministerial framings of "Kiwi values" centre on a small cluster of ideas: freedom of expression and speech, equal rights regardless of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion, and the rule of law. The Prime Minister's reference point is comparative — what the UK and Australia have done. The ACT framing is rights-based and individual. The NZ First framing is cultural and pledging.
What is conspicuously absent from all of these public framings is any reference to te Tiriti o Waitangi, biculturalism, te ao Māori, or New Zealand's Pacific identity — themes that are absolutely central to most other formal statements about what the country is. That gap is the subject of a separate page.