Chris Trotter says if Christopher Luxon secured his promised New Zealand-India FTA by giving India what it most wants, NZ First would have all it needed to campaign against its former coalition partner with every prospect of increasing its tally of seats

By Chris Trotter*

What does India want from New Zealand? Not our dairy products, that’s for sure, it’s got plenty of those. Indeed 45 percent of the Indian population are small-scale farmers, most of them running a few head of cattle – not to eat, you understand – but to milk. If it once made no sense to send coals to Newcastle, it makes even less sense, in 2025, to send dairy products to India.

So, what does India want?

To answer that question it is important to understand where India currently stands in the process of economic maturation. In the most brutal terms, India stands in roughly the same place as Britain stood when the agricultural and industrial revolutions were generating population pressures that were fast becoming unsustainable. For a while, Britain’s industrial revolution was able to soak up most of the victims of its agricultural revolution. Those who could not, or (understandably) would not, be absorbed into the “dark satanic mills” of industrialisation, took the option of emigration.

The crucial difference between Britain’s options in the Nineteenth century and India’s options in the Twenty-First is that the Earth is carrying roughly eight times as many human-beings as it was in 1825.

Two hundred years ago there were places for Britain’s (and Europe’s) excess population to go. North America and Australasia were blessed with land – vast quantities of land – whose numerically insignificant (thanks to the arrival of European pathogens against which they had no natural immunity) indigenous peoples could not hope to defend, and the colonisers took it. Resource rich, and soon to become people rich, these territories contributed decisively to the global reach and power of the European way of doing business.

Returning to that extraordinary statistic relating to India’s primary production sector – i.e. that 45 percent of its population are small-scale farmers – what must happen if India wishes to conform to the historical rules of economic development? Simply put, those small farmers must be replaced by the sort of large-scale, and vastly more efficient, farming enterprises that characterise North American, European, and Australasian agriculture.

Will the small farmers of India go quietly into the good historical night? Unlikely.

Viewed dispassionately, the political raison d’être of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has always been to capture India’s small farmers before they were captured irretrievably by ideological forces less malleable to the needs of India’s elites. Modi’s Hindu nationalist populism has proved itself many times over, albeit at the cost of dismantling the Congress Party’s secular dream of a modern, religiously tolerant, and inclusive Indian state.

But, if India’s elites are to be congratulated for saving the world from the emergence of not one nation with a billion-plus citizens under the control of a communist party, but two, then that success has been won at the cost of seriously distorting the evolution of India’s economy.

Fewer than 20 percent of India’s labour force are employed in the nation’s secondary industries, and most of them are construction workers. As things now stand, there is simply no way India’s vast numbers of small-holders and agricultural labourers can be absorbed (as Britain’s were) in its factories. Not to put too fine a point upon it, China has already beaten India in the race to create a second “workshop of the world”.

Barring a geopolitical cataclysm, China’s victory is not about to be reversed anytime soon.

So, where does that leave Christopher Luxon and his ambitious plans to open up India to New Zealand’s exports?

It leaves him facing a nation that must somehow earn enough from its secondary and tertiary sectors to keep its small-holders safe from the ambitions of investors determined to rationalise Indian agriculture.

This raises a number of possibilities for “New Zealand Inc”. Not the least of which is the contribution this country’s agricultural expertise could make to the voluntary consolidation of small-scale Indian farming operations into larger, more efficient, and much more profitable units. This country’s long history of successful farmer co-operatives makes it the ideal partner for a more equitable, owner-driven, transformation of India’s agricultural sector.

New Zealand could also embark on a major upscaling of it educational exports to India. This could be done in two ways: firstly, by providing New Zealand’s tertiary institutions with the resources required to make many more places available to full-fee-paying Indian students; and secondly, by inviting Indian investors to participate alongside New Zealand universities in establishing “franchise” institutions in India itself.

Tuition in English, at New Zealand’s well-established and (generally) well-respected universities, remains a powerful selling-point to middle-class Indian parents anxious to see their offspring well-credentialled in an increasingly competitive society. Most particularly when merit-based access to the upper-ranks of income-earners – via the most prestigious Indian universities – can no longer be guaranteed.

None of these options are a “sure thing”, however, while the offer that would really open doors for New Zealand Inc continues to be ruled out-of-bounds by New Zealand’s negotiators. What India really wants from New Zealand isn’t butter or cheese, but a radical relaxation of the rules controlling Indian immigration.

India isn’t seeking this concession because it is in love with New Zealand’s scenery, or its values. The Indian government is seeking similar changes from the United States, Canada, and Australia – as well as New Zealand. By increasing the Indian diaspora, it is hoped, India will follow in China’s footsteps. Trade may or may not follow a nation’s flag, but it sure as heck follows its people.

It is difficult to see the National Government being willing to court the political backlash that such a dramatic increase in Indian immigration would doubtless engender. Were Luxon to secure his promised New Zealand-India FTA by giving India what it most wants, NZ First would have all it needed to campaign against its former coalition partner with every prospect of increasing its tally of seats. Te Pati Māori would, similarly, be free to its indulge its worst xenophobic impulses without fear of losing votes. One suspects that even Labour would struggle to stay off the anti-immigrant band-wagon. Only the Greens could embrace the new policy without reservation.

That said, facilitating Indian immigration makes solid historical sense. The expectation that New Zealand could remain forever a proud redoubt of British ethnicity and culture at the bottom of the world should never have survived the demise of the British Empire. Indeed, there are those who argue strongly that it didn’t. They point to the 1986 Burke Report that quietly recommended the discarding of the de facto “White New Zealand” policy in favour of an immigration policy geared towards creating a multicultural New Zealand.

Given the fact that, in 2025, upwards of 20 percent of New Zealand residents were born somewhere else, the policy must be accounted a success.

An interesting exercise in counterfactual history is to ask what sort of country New Zealand would have grown into had the Burke Report recommended the continuation and strengthening of the White New Zealand policy. Rather than the generally welcoming and inclusive multicultural society that Aotearoa-New Zealand has grown into over the last 40 years, an alternative vision, of an embittered and isolated nation of increasingly unapologetic white supremacists, is distressingly easy to imagine.

Quite where that would have left Māori is anybody’s guess. Without Te Reo? Without the Waitangi Tribunal? With Te Tiriti once again dismissed as “a simple nullity”. Reduced to an unrelenting diet of white-bread and butter?

Faced with that dismal vision, a bowl of spicy Rogan Ghosh, with a side-plate of Naan Bread, doesn’t sound so bad!

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.