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by Santiago Bonhomme

A few years ago, I walked into a polling booth in Arrowtown and voted.
I am not a citizen. I am a permanent resident.

I remember that vote not for its outcome, but for what it represented. I was being asked for an opinion on the future of the country where my family and I had decided to build our lives.

As is always the case in the lead-up to an election, political parties vying for the limelight come up with some challenging, attention-grabbing policies.

One that certainly got my attention was changing the status quo that allows eligible NZ residents to vote in national elections, to citizens only. New Zealand has permitted eligible residents and citizens to vote since 1975, one of the few countries in the world to do so.

This policy change would affect not only my family, still on our way to citizenship, but many other Queenstown families in the same situation.

On one hand there is the symbolic merit of the proposed change, that citizenship represents commitment, and that the right to decide the country’s future should belong to those who have formalised that bond. Furthermore, that whoever votes should have permanent legal ties to the country, not merely one of residency.

On the other hand, the concern with this policy, which affects my family and many others in the Queenstown area, is that permanent residents can raise children here, work, start businesses, employ people, pay taxes, grow old here. They can spend twenty or thirty years in New Zealand and remain a permanent resident. What part of that life is temporary?

There is another discomfort in this argument, too. Being a citizen does not guarantee commitment either. There are New Zealand citizens who have spent much of their lives abroad, while permanent residents live here for decades, generating employment and actively participating in their communities. I am not saying one group loves New Zealand more than the other. I am saying something simpler, that a document certifies our legal status, but can hardly measure how much we have committed our lives to a place.

Queenstown has this same argument all the time, about who counts as local and who doesn’t. Is it the years spent here, or the contribution made?

In a year I will be eligible to apply for citizenship, and I likely will. My wife and children too. But I find it hard to accept that only on that day will New Zealand’s future suddenly become my concern.

It already is.