Immigration, Paris climate pact, nuclear power on agenda as NZ First meets

Friday, 5 September 2025

NZ First members will assemble in Palmerston North this weekend to discuss party policy on immigration, the Paris climate agreement and nuclear power.

The party’s annual convention will begin on Saturday morning, with nearly 300 members expected to spend the weekend hearing from four speakers and discussing policy remits, or proposals, as the party looks towards the 2026 election.

NZ First leader Winston Peters said the convention would have the highest number of delegates since they began in 1993, and more than 45 remits would be discussed. He will give a public speech on Sunday afternoon at the city’s conference centre.

“We'll announce policies that we'll be campaigning on for the next election,” he said, in an interview this week.

More than 18 months into Government and NZ First members have reason to be satisfied. Most mainstream polls in recent months have the party gaining support and reaching as high as 9%, an improvement on its 2023 election result of 6%.

Peters expected “other parties trying to foreclose on New Zealand's rise in the polls will try and imitate our policies before we announce them on Sunday, but it'd be too late”.

This possibly informed remark proved prescient. A day after the interview, on Tuesday, ACT Party leader David Seymour announced his party was “now calling for a better deal from Paris”, the international climate treaty which partially sets New Zealand’s emissions reduction goals.

Campaigning on the Paris agreement has been raised by NZ First MP Shane Jones at town hall meetings he has held across the country in recent weeks, and Peters said he had raised issues with the Paris agreement “a long, long time ago”.

But NZ First would not be campaigning on withdrawing from the Paris agreement, instead on having a “full scale debate in this country as to why on earth the other political parties are maintaining a position they cannot explain in any logic”.

Other areas marked out to campaign on are immigration policy, and possibly whether New Zealand should open the door to nuclear energy.

Peters has campaigned on immigration issues and anxieties for decades.

While backlash against immigration has prompted protest in Australia and the United Kingdom in recent weeks, Peters’ promise to renew this campaign comes at a time when net migration into New Zealand is comparatively low after a post-pandemic spike.

In 2017, during an election fought in part on immigration policy, Peters wanted to reduce net migration to 10,000 a year. In 2016, net migration reached about 63,000 in the year to November, as more than 140,000 people entered the country.

Migrant arrivals now sit at 138,000 in the year to June, however due to the outflow of people, net migration was 13,700.

Asked why immigration was a current issue, Peters said because Labour brought in a “colossal number” of people without the required infrastructure or “scale or judgement” for what was needed.

The post-pandemic peak in migration had net migration reach 135,000 for the year to October 2023, as the National-led coalition entered Government.

“It's a founding principle of NZ First. [Migration] should never be a substitute for failing to skill, train, and employ your own people first … so we're saying we're going to put a tighter focus on that.”

Peters said party members had put forward a remit on nuclear power. He said every time the subject was raised “people keep on thinking about the past, not realising that there’s dramatic changes happening”.

He said Wellington company OpenStar Technologies, which is part of a global race to produce nuclear fusion energy, was “an exciting proposition”.

“We've got to get ready for this time, and it'll be of enormous advantage to the world, let alone this country.”

New Zealand law bans nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered vessels, but not civilian nuclear energy.