Erin Gourley left New Zealand in 2024 for Europe, and says there's a 'huge risk' of New Zealanders forgetting to vote _ even if they're politically minded. Former local government reporter Erin Gourley forgot to vote in last year’s council elections. She was living in Sweden, where she moved to study law in 2024. Now registered as an overseas voter, Gourley says she won’t be making that mistake again. “It’s crazy, because I used to be a local government reporter – but I just fully didn’t realise that was a thing you could do”.
by Fox Meyer (Newsroom): Photo - Supplied Erin Gournley
What about this year’s general election, set down for November 7? Gourley doesn’t even know where she’ll be living then. “I would say there’s a huge risk of people forgetting, because I’m pretty politically engaged – and it wasn’t until I was talking to some other New Zealanders that I was like, ‘Oh, shoot, I should probably register to vote for the upcoming general election’.”
Gourley is one of what’s believed to be a million eligible voters who live outside of New Zealand – a voting bloc the Greens have credited with winning them at least one seat in Parliament in previous elections.
After the huge exodus that saw 143,000 Kiwis leave New Zealand between 2023 and 2025, political parties know every vote will count come November 7, and are already strategising on how to win the support of that missing million.
When Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins spoke to reporters on Wednesday, following the announcement of election day, he opened by talking about the record number of Kiwis leaving the country.
Young people, who tend to vote liberal, have led the departure rates: people aged 18 to 30 years made up 27,200 (38 percent) of the 71,800 New Zealand citizens who left in the year ending June 2025.
Overseas voters as a whole also tend to vote liberal, but historically only one in 10 actually casts a vote in general elections.
Tracey Lee, director of overseas voting campaign group Every Kiwi Vote Counts, told Newsroom this voting bloc had the potential to make a big difference in the upcoming election.
Lee said the total eligible voters living overseas represented an electorate 10 times the size of Auckland’s. Even if only one in 10 of those cast a vote, that was still an electorate with the power to influence an election. “It’s not an insignificant number, if you think about it as a voting bloc,” she said, adding that it was a constituency that could make a difference to the election outcome.
“We’ve always been a nation that’s had a large constituency offshore. How we actually embrace that circular migration is part of New Zealand’s DNA.”
Data was hard to come by, but according to past elections, Lee said several seats could shift in either direction after special and overseas votes were counted. “Certainly it would have made a difference to the ability to negotiate who was going to be in government in the last election.
“I think the numbers are so close this time that – it’s not massive, it’s not like it’s going to sway everything – but because everything’s so undecided in terms of being able to form governments, a few seats can make a big difference.”
Without better data, it was hard to identify exactly what this voting bloc’s demographics were. “There is no formal knowledge of who’s offshore, how long they’ve been, whether they’ll come back, never mind how they vote,” Lee said.
According to Lee, the data showed overseas voters tended to lean towards Labour and the Greens, but she wasn’t sure that pattern would hold given a global shift towards the right.
Lee wanted to see a position created for a Minister of the Diaspora, similar to the arrangement in the Irish Parliament, which represents overseas nationals. As it stands, the Green Party is the only sitting political party with a dedicated spokesperson for overseas New Zealanders, a position filled by Lawrence Xu-Nan.
Xu-Nan recently collected reports from 400 overseas voters, who said they struggled to get involved with local politics. Across the board, there was one policy issue they cared most about: student loan repayment.
Local borrowers have no interest on their student loans, but as soon as someone moved overseas, interest rates began at 4.9 percent. Xu-Nan said many weren’t aware of this, and would be hit with a repayment notice upon returning to New Zealand: “A lot of people are going to be in shock,” he said.
The amount owed by overseas borrowers ballooned from $289 million in the 2011 financial year to $2.2 billion in the last financial year. Xu-Nan said 68 percent of borrowers were overdue on their loans; “That’s a system issue. That’s not just people simply refusing to pay,” he said.
Xu-Nan took the matter to Parliament’s Education and Workforce Committee and asked for a full inquiry into the matter, and wrote to Minister for Universities Shane Reti.
“I do appreciate the fact that Minister Reti is someone who likes to see the evidence and likes to see the data and make those kind of decisions based on sound data.”
Reti in response acknowledged the growth in overseas loan debt and increase in overdue payments, and Xu-Nan’s concerns about the potential impact of current policy settings on people’s ability or willingness to return home.
Reti additionally told Newsroom: “We need to be fair to the Kiwis who stayed and worked hard to repay their loans, as well as those who moved overseas but continued to meet their obligations. They did the right thing, and we expect others to do the same.”
Xu-Nan said the Greens wanted to make the issue as non-partisan as possible given how important it was.
Xu-Nan’s party has historically been supported by younger voters.
Of enrolled voters, 74.2 percent of the 18- to 24-year-old demographic participated in the 2023 election, 4 percentage points below the national average. These voters made up a sizeable portion of those who had recently moved offshore at record rates, and now belong to the overseas pool, which tends to vote at an even lower rate of 10 percent.
Green Party spokesperson for immigration Ricardo Menéndez March told Newsroom this demographic had been important for his party, and credited them with winning the Greens at least one seat in past elections.
They had the balance of power to help decide the next government, and a high turnout could see them be a “deciding bloc”, he said.
He thought that drivers for emigration – like job cuts – could also encourage heavier involvement from overseas voters than ever before.
“From my own experiences of knowing people have moved overseas, I know that many of them are acutely aware of the decisions that were made here that drove them to move offshore, including, for example, job cuts …”
He thought that if people had felt forced to move for economic reasons, they could be looking for change on November 7.
“What we’ve got is a large group of people who made the hard decision of relocating overseas due to economic conditions, and if they realise their power, they also could create conditions for things to change so that they feel like they can come back.”
The Greens were not the only party looking to win the overseas vote. Act Party leader David Seymour told Newsroom he had a simple message for Kiwis who no longer call New Zealand home: “There’s a reason that you’re not here. And Act has always been a party that is prepared to agitate and ask tough questions about why that is.
“Often, we find that people who have left, they’ve got some get up and go, they found that they’ve been dragged down for staying here by our culture and our bureaucracy. We want to hear from you.”
Campaign communications adviser for the National Party Ethan Foster told Newsroom National would be campaigning for every vote possible, including from overseas. But right now, the party’s priority was delivering on its plan to “fix the basics and build the future to secure a better future for all New Zealanders”.
Meanwhile, Labour Party campaign manager Beth Houston told Newsroom Labour had always run overseas election campaigns in Australia and the UK, where it relies on networks of expats living there. “We’ll be doing that again in 2026, and we’re keen for any overseas Kiwis who are keen to help get involved.”
Fox Meyer is a political reporter based in Wellington.