We like to think of ourselves as living in a quiet corner of the world — too small, too remote and too innocuous to be worth anyone’s time to meddle in our affairs.
Our security services no longer share that traditional Kiwi complacency.
In its 2025 Security Threat Environment assessment, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service placed foreign interference at the top of its list of threats facing the country, warning that the global security environment is deteriorating.
It broke with precedent in attributing the People’s Republic of China as the most active state involved in undermining our security, though noting that it is not the only one.
The SIS bluntly described foreign states seeking to interfere with our democratic rights. When the agency charged with the security of the realm says foreign powers are testing our country’s vulnerabilities, it is time to review and reinforce our safeguards.
Elections are an obvious pressure point, in part because this is where influence can be converted most directly into power.
Parliament has already taken some concrete steps here, and several recent administrations deserve credit in this regard.
In 2019, Parliament slashed the cap on foreign donations to parties and candidates from $1500 to $50, and in 2024 it added new foreign interference offences to the Crimes Act: criminalising covert, deceptive, coercive or corrupt conduct on behalf of a foreign power that targets protected interests, including the conduct of elections.
These are not trivial reforms. They put New Zealand closer to the standards our partners in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom already maintain.
But a cap is only as strong as its weakest exception, and ours has several.
The foreign donation ban does not affect money routed through New Zealand-registered companies, trusts or foundations, which means a determined foreign interest can still fund a party perfectly legally by investing its cash locally first.
And anonymous donations of up to $6000 can be made without limit on how many a party accepts. This creates the possibility of overseas interests supporting a candidate by splitting their donations and channelling the cash via such devices as fundraiser functions under multiple guests’ names, all under a shroud of secrecy.
Money is one vector for interference, and information is another.
Reforms have also forced declarations of authorship on to online election advertising, a sensible response to the flood of anonymous social media advertisements seen overseas.
Yet disclosure rules written for billboards will struggle to restrict co-ordinated influence operations, micro-targeted and individualised content and the new synthetic media that can be produced by AI applications at vast scale and at light speed.
The SIS has documented attempts to shape public opinion through social media manipulation. In 2024, it also attributed a cyber intrusion into Parliament’s systems to a state actor.
A disinformation campaign timed around an election may not need to change many minds to change outcomes.
For example, Te Pati Māori’s Takutai Tarsh Kemp unseated Labour MP Peeni Henare by only four votes in Tāmaki Makaurau on election night 2023, rising to just over 40 on judicial recount.
And MMP often gives us governments with razor-thin margins. The 2017-20 Labour-led administration had a working majority of only two seats.
Moreover, insidious disinformation can corrode trust in the result itself, which is often the real objective.
None of this justifies a panicked approach, or a crackdown on our long-standing liberties. Openness is not a weakness, per se.
And objections to tougher rules must be taken seriously: free speech, robust dissent and the ordinary cultural life and political rights of diaspora communities are not threats, but constitutionally guaranteed strengths of our society.
Laws drawn too broadly could chill exactly the sort of participation a democracy like New Zealand’s depends upon.
The Council for Civil Liberties and the Law Society raised precisely these concerns about the 2024 offences.
Nor is the answer to do less, but to legislate with precision — targeting the covert, coercive and deceptive, while leaving open advocacy, lobbying, satire and protest as plainly lawful.
While it is too late now for the 2026 general election, the next Parliament should act to close the local company/trust loophole for channelling foreign funding, and further modernise transparency rules for digital campaigning.
It must also give the Electoral Commission the resources and powers it needs to actually enforce the rules. Each of these steps would make New Zealand a markedly harder target.
The SIS made one further point worth remembering: in an open society like ours, the public will often notice a threat before security agencies do.
Resilience against foreign influence is not something the state can simply purchase from security agencies or legislate for comprehensively on our behalf. It is the responsibility of us all to exercise our discernment when viewing election advertisements, remain vigilant and call out poor behaviour by bad actors when we see it.
• Paul Foster-Bell is a former National List MP and diplomat who now works for the University of Otago. All views expressed are solely his own.
