New Zealand’s parliament passed a law criminalizing wage theft on 13 March, meaning that victims will now be able to report suspected wage theft to the police for investigation. The law carries penalties of up to NZD 30,000 and one year in prison. Wage theft was previously considered a matter for civil courts, meaning that a worker who suspected her employer of wage theft needed to hire legal counsel and purse the case in civil courts. The bill’s sponsor, Camilla Belich of the opposition Labour Party, argued the civil process was lengthy, complicated, and dissuaded victims of wage theft from seeking recompense. The governing National Party opposed the bill on the grounds that too many criminal cases would “clog up the courts.”

Sources: Radio New Zealand, DLA Piper

 A lawyer for Mana-Apiti Brown filed a legal challenge in March in Wellington’s High Court to New Zealand’s “gang patch ban”, which allows for fines of up to NZD 5,000 or six-months’ imprisonment for wearing clothing with the insignia of one of 41 recognized gangs in public. The case alleges that the ban infringes on freedoms of expression and association, a legal argument which was also made in a report by Attorney-General Judith Collins on the ban when it was still under parliamentary consideration. Brown was convicted of wearing a hat with the name and logo of a gang in the Lower Hutt suburb of Naenae on 7 December 2024 and was discharged with a criminal conviction but without further penalty. Proponents of the patch ban say it allows police to proactively prevent gangs from intimidating community members. Between the law’s enactment on 21 November 2024 and 24 February 2025, police charged 337 individuals and seized 76 patches or articles of clothing.

Sources: Radio New Zealand (1), Radio New Zealand (2)

 New Zealand’s parliament unanimously approved a law to grant legal personhood to the mountain Taranaki Maunga as part of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process. In practice, this means the mountain and surrounding national park, Te Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki, will have the same rights and responsibilities of a legal person, and the lands themselves will be jointly managed by Crown representatives and the eight Maori iwi who historically inhabited the area. The decision comes after nine years of petitioning and negotiations between Taranaki iwi and the New Zealand government. The mountain is the third natural feature to be granted legal personhood in the country, and the status is intended to act as restitution for disposed Maori communities, preserve traditional use of the land, and conserve the native ecosystem.

Sources: Radio New Zealand, Jurist

The Fast-Track Approvals Bill passed its third and final reading in Parliament on 17 December. The bill provides for a ‘fast-track’ for the approval of development projects deemed by a civil servant committee to be of regional or national importance and names 149 projects for initial consideration. The bill was criticized by environmental groups and the parliamentary opposition for excluding environmental considerations and relevant state agencies from the streamlined process, for prohibiting public, expert, or civil society comment, and for failing to consider conflicts of interest both in selecting committee members and in the list of initial projects. After months of debate and sizable protests in June, the bill was passed quickly in December with limited information about the included projects available to either the public or to parliament; documents explaining the 149 included projects were not available to MPs until 72 hours before the third and final vote. The bill will formally become law when signed by New Zealand’s Governor-General.

Sources: Radio New Zealand, New Zealand Herald, The Guardian

New Zealand’s parliament unanimously passed the Citizenship Western Samoa Restoration Amendment Bill, which provides a path to regain New Zealand citizenship for Samoans who were stripped of it by a 1982 act of parliament. New Zealand administered Samoa between 1920 and 1961 under an international mandate. In 1982, the Privy Council ruled that Western Samoans born between 1924 and 1948 were British subjects and that from 1 January 1949 they and their descendants had become New Zealand citizens. The 1982 legislation overruled this decision and denied citizenship to a wide category of Samoan people in New Zealand. Samoans born between 1924 and 1948 who were present in New Zealand in 1982 may now apply to regain New Zealand Citizenship. To regain it, those affected must now apply and prove they were present in the country in 1982. Representatives of the Samoan community praised the law, the result of decades of activist pressure, for partially righting a historical wrong, but criticized it for not benefitting descendants of those affected or completely overturning the 1982 act of parliament.

Sources: Pacific Islands Times, New Zealand Herald 

The New Zealand government introduced a bill to ‘reinterpret’ the country’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed between more than 500 Maori chiefs and the British Crown in 1840. The introduction of the bill came at the behest of a junior partner of the governing coalition, the ACT New Zealand party, which argues the Treaty unfairly privileges Maori people and has drafted the bill as means of granting parliament the power to legally reinterpret the treaty. The rest of the governing coalition has agreed to support ACT in initial votes on the bill but will not support it becoming law. The bill’s introduction has been met with large nationwide protests and parliamentary sessions have been twice disrupted by opposition MPs. Legal experts, including members of the ruling National Party, say that the introduction of the bill, which likely will not pass, will nonetheless damage relations between the party and the Maori community, and expect debates and public discussion to be fraught and exacerbate existing social divisions with unpredictable consequences. 

Update: The bill received only 11 of 123 votes in parliament and did not pass. Opposition Labour leader Chris Hipkins was one of many who remained deeply critical that the legislation was tabled in the first place, saying it would always “be a stain on our country”. A record 300,000 written comments were submitted by the public, 90 per cent of which were against the bill. The bill’s sponsor, ACT leader David Seymour, said he hopes to revive the bill during next year’s election.

Sources: Reuters, Radio New Zealand (1), Public Services International, British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio New Zealand (2)