Is New Zealand citizenship for sale?
Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and a Kiwi passport
This has my head spinning. Yesterday the Herald revealed that American billionaire and major Trump campaign donor (we’re talking millions of dollars, not just a few thousand), Peter Thiel, has been granted New Zealand citizenship.
Usually to become a citizen (if you’re not a billionaire) you have to either be born here, have lived here for 70% of the last five years, or be granted refugee status. Thiel does not tick any of these boxes.
How did an American citizen bypass the rules to get a New Zealand passport? The short answer, it seems, is money.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naive enough to think that inviting rich-listers to live in New Zealand is a bad idea in and of itself. Rich-listers can bring investment, and investment can be good. What troubles me is this:
➜ Thiel was able to bypass the rules the rest of us have to abide by.
If billionaires can buy themselves citizenship in New Zealand, what (or who) else can they buy?
➜ Thiel has a history of using his money for political influence.
In an election year, we can’t afford to allow big money to poison our democracy.
➜ It’s not fair that billionaires like Thiel can get citizenship abroad to run from the problems they helped create.
Thiel emerged late last year as a key advisor to Trump. The fact that he can now easily run away from the very rules and regulations he has helped Trump shape is despicable. Trump’s first actions as President have been to plow ahead with the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, rollback affordable healthcare to millions of Americans, make it even harder for millions of women in developing countries to access the vital health care they need and “build the wall” of xenophobia and racism. Unlike Thiel, the millions of people impacted by Trump do not have a backup passport — or indeed, even the funds for a plane ticket abroad.
Thiel made a $1million contribution to the Canterbury recovery fund a few months before his citizenship appeal was accepted, and I applaud him for that. But, a donation to people in need should not give you a free pass to override the law. New Zealanders have collectively chipped in billions of dollars toward the Canterbury recovery, does that mean we get special treatment too? The world gets messy when large charitable donations are mixed up with political decisions.
Transparency is essential to the health of a functional democracy.
In the 2014 General Election, political parties in New Zealand collectively spent $8.9million to try and win our votes. With a personal wealth of NZ$3.7billion, Peter Thiel, or others like him, could easily buy influence in this year’s election — despite our relatively good electoral laws.
To meet the growing influence of big money in politics head on, people who want to protect our democracy from the moneyed interests will need to:
- Invest heavily in building the capacity of people who care: ActionStation (where I work) exists to create change, not just add to the noise. We are a small team of four and our job is to direct our members’ precious time energy for maximum impact, whatever we’re doing. Over the next few months, we will be focussing on increasing our capacity by unleashing the power of volunteers. I was very lucky to recently meet two of the Senior Advisors to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign — Becky Bond and Zack Exley. The power duo gave a presentation on how they were able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of volunteers to take Bernie’s message from zero public awareness, to a near defeat of Clinton in a matter of months. I can’t wait to put those learnings into practise here.
(FYI: If you’re interested in learning some of these tricks yourself, I suggest buying yourself a copy of their excellent book, ‘Rules for Revolutionaries: How big organiz(s)ing can change everything’.)
- Use new technologies to scale up political participation: The number one proven tactic for getting people out to vote is ‘voter contact’. Meaning someone had a one-on-one conversation with a potential voter — either on the phone, via text message or on their doorstep — and that conversation swayed the person to vote. This election year, we plan to use top-notch technology to unleash the power of people to have hundreds of thousands of conversations with potential voters in New Zealand.
- Spend ad money strategically: Trump spent $150 million dollars on Facebook and Instagram advertisements in the final weeks of the US Election. Facebook has an incredible ability to strategically target ads to specific audiences at one tenth the cost of traditional television advertising. In New Zealand, there are at least two and a half million people who use Facebook every day. That’s a big audience to tap into at one tenth the cost of TV advertising.
The people who live in, and love this country must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a fairer, more flourishing economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides healthcare for all?
Are we prepared to take on the growing economic and political power of the mega-rich in Aotearoa, or do we continue to slide into a state of American-style politics? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.
As individuals, there’s a limit to what we can achieve. Especially if we don’t happen to be billionaires. But when we all come together to do what we can, the result adds up to far more than the sum of its parts.
