Members of New Zealand's Samoan Community watched the bill pass it's third reading back in November 2024. Photo: VNP/Louis Collins
More than 2,000 Samoan people have had their New Zealand citizenship restored, a year on since the passing of legislation to restore citizenship to a group who had it stripped from them in the 1980s.
In November 2024, Parliament passed the Citizenship (Western Samoa) Restoration Amendment Act, with unanimous support.
The legislation restored a citizenship pathway to Samoans born between 13 May 1924 and 1 January 1949.
Many had their citizenship stripped in 1982, when the Muldoon government nullified a Privy Council ruling that Samoans born between those dates were British subjects, and therefore entitled to New Zealand citizenship.
Appearing before Parliament's Governance and Administration Committee on Wednesday, Department of Internal Affairs officials said DIA was moving "very quickly" with applicants.
As at 30 November, DIA said 2,294 had been granted citizenship, out of 2,356 applications. Thirteen were withdrawn or declined, and 49 were marked as 'on hand.'
DIA deputy secretary of regulatory and identity services Rachel Leota said out of the estimates, there were "less than a few hundred" that could possibly still apply.
"It's for a certain period of time when people were born, so obviously they'll be eligible to apply until they're no longer with us, so we'll just be able to keep that going," she said.
It is estimated approximately 3,500 people may be eligible for citizenship by grant under the legislation's provisions.
Successful applicants to citizenship receive refunds.
Leota said DIA had improved the timeframes for refunds from six to eight weeks to one to ten days.
New Zealand First MP Andy Foster asked whether the applicants were New Zealand-based, Samoa-based but intending to move to New Zealand, or whether they were people based in Samoa that were wanting New Zealand passports to make it easier to travel.
"Do we know if that's changed people's domicile, in other words whether they've used it to say, 'actually, I would now want to move from Samoa to New Zealand,' or it's just, 'this is great, because now I can travel easy?'" he asked
DIA said it was not tracked, and it was up to the applicant to choose how they used their passport.
In response to questions from National MP Tom Rutherford over whether it had meant DIA had to scale up its resourcing, Secretary for Internal Affairs Paul James said DIA managed between 35,000 and 40,000 citizenship applications per year, and so the Samoan applications amounted to an increase of around ten percent, which DIA could manage with existing resources.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
