Open Letter to the Honourable Christopher Luxon, Prime Minister of Corporation New Zealand

OPINION: Dear Mr. Prime Minister, greetings from one of the more awkward shareholders in the enterprise formerly known as Aotearoa New Zealand. I hope this letter finds you well, ideally between board meetings and that recurring democratic inconvenience known as Question Time.

I will keep this brief, because I know your time is valuable and, presumably, billable. Racism is bad for the bottom line. There, I said it. Feel free to file it in the next quarterly report under “Risks to Brand Reputation and Operational Efficiency.”

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Luxon, you, of all people, should grasp this instinctively. You ran Air New Zealand. Imagine if the airline had started assigning seats based on who looked like they “belonged” in business class. Complaints would skyrocket. The Net Promoter Score would crater. The share price would perform that sad little nosedive that sends institutional investors reaching for the antacids.

Racism is the corporate equivalent of serving expired in-flight meals while the safety video insists the brand values are “inclusive excellence.”

Image: Students on campus at Massey University. International education generated $4.52 billion in education-related travel exports for New Zealand in the year ended September 2025. Separately, 92,580 international students were enrolled with New Zealand education providers during 2025, with China accounting for 34 percent. (Supplied / Massey University)

Now let us open the books, since the books are your love language.

Start with education, the export you never have to put on a ship.

Education New Zealand values the sector at $4.52 billion for the year ended September 2025, up from $3.6 billion in 2024, which amounts to 13.6 percent of everything this country earns from services exports and places education inside the top ten exports of any kind. Read that again. We earn more from teaching the world’s children than from several things we actually dig up, milk, or shear.

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And who is enrolling? Education New Zealand’s own full-year data confirms 92,580 international student enrolments in 2025, an 11 percent increase on 2024, with China accounting for 34 percent of them, comfortably our largest source market. One in three of those tuition cheques, Mr. Prime Minister, arrives from the very community that certain political entrepreneurs in this country enjoy treating as a punchline, a peril, or a talkback segment. And the trend is running your way: your own Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, through its Migration Data Explorer, records nearly 40,000 full fee-paying international students holding visas as of June 2026, up 9 percent on the year before.

The customers are queuing at the door. It would be a distinctly bold retail strategy to greet them with suspicion.

Image: Education Minister Erica Stanford. International students spent an average of $45,000 each in New Zealand in 2024, while the Government is targeting a $7.2 billion international education sector by 2034. (File. / Supplied)

Your own Education Minister has done the arithmetic for us.

The average international student spent $45,000 across the year in 2024, money that flows into cafes, restaurants, attractions, and jobs. Every student is a walking regional development programme.

Your Government’s own plan, the one with “Going for Growth” in the title, aims to double the sector to $7.2 billion by 2034. Allow me to translate that ambition into plain commercial English: you are asking hundreds of thousands of young people, overwhelmingly from Asia, to trust us with their money, their safety, and their futures.

A country cannot simultaneously court the Chinese international student and wink at the politics of “go back to where you came from.” That is called insulting the customer at the point of sale, and no loyalty scheme survives it.

Here, in fact, is our actual competitive advantage, and it is a moat your competitors are busily draining on our behalf.

Education New Zealand’s 2025 perceptions survey finds that 77 percent of New Zealanders want the same or more international students here, compared with barely half of Australians and fewer than half of Britons polled. Our brand, to use the dialect of your people, is that we are not them.

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Every racist incident, every dog whistle pitched at the frequency of a by-election, is a unilateral write-down of that brand. We are, in effect, taking our single clearest point of market differentiation and setting it on fire to keep a talkback host warm.

Image: Containers and freight at the Port of Auckland, a key gateway for New Zealand’s trade with overseas markets. China is New Zealand’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade worth more than $41 billion in the year to September 2025. (Shutterstock)

Zoom out further and the exposure only grows.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will confirm that China is New Zealand’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade valued at more than NZ$41 billion in the year ending September 2025, our largest source of international students, a significant source of foreign investment, and a major tourism market. The New Zealand China Council puts it even more plainly: we exported almost $20 billion in goods to China in the year to December 2025, close to double our next two biggest markets, the United States and Australia, combined, and we supply more than half of all the dairy China imports from the entire world.

I am not making a foreign policy argument here; I am making a hospitality one. It is very hard to sell milk powder, logs, lamb, kiwifruit, degrees, and glacier tours to people while a portion of your political class treats their cousins at the dairy counter as a demographic emergency. Customers notice. Customers have group chats. Customers have alternatives, and Australia and Canada print their brochures in Mandarin too.

This country runs on trade, tourism, skilled migration, and the quiet national sport of complaining about the weather while exporting everything that is not nailed down.

Racism is putting “We Prefer Customers Who Look Like Us” in the shop window. It is terrible marketing. It narrows the talent pool. It makes the country look smaller and meaner than it is, and in a small open economy that depends on the rest of the world not laughing at us, looking mean is expensive.

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Image: The Beehive in Wellington, home to the offices of New Zealand’s Government. Mohan Dutta argues racism is socially corrosive and an economic distraction from bigger national challenges including productivity, housing and infrastructure. (Supplied / Samuel Hudson / Quiet Pact Network)

I am not asking you to rewrite the anthem in seventeen languages or convene mandatory sensitivity circles in the Beehive cafeteria.

I am simply observing that treating people as though their worth is not determined by ancestry turns out, statistically speaking, to be good for productivity.

Diverse teams solve harder problems. Societies that do not burn their energy on racial score-settling get more done. This is not woke magic. This is the boring observation that spite is a low-return investment with terrible liquidity.

There is a charming New Zealand tradition of punching above our weight. Racism is the opposite. It is punching ourselves in the face and acting surprised when the mirror looks bruised. It is also, if we are being brutally honest about the books, a distraction from the actual hard problems: housing, infrastructure, productivity, and the eternal mystery of why cheese costs more here than in a small European principality.

Image: Professor Mohan Dutta has received an international award recognising his leadership on academic freedom. (File. / Mohan Dutta / @mjdutt)

Consider this a friendly note from the customer-service desk of the nation. Racism is not a growth strategy.

It is not a competitive advantage. It is not even an original brand of politics; it is the oldest white-label product on the shelf. It is, to borrow the language of your former boardroom, a value destroyer, and unlike a bad quarter, it compounds.

Perhaps we could attempt the radical experiment of judging people by the content of their character and the quality of their work rather than the packaging. Shocking, I know. Almost as shocking as expecting a country to function like a competent organisation rather than a never-ending culture-war focus group.

Yours in reluctant but optimistic shareholding,

A concerned stakeholder who still believes the company can turn a profit without the bigotry.

P.S. If the next campaign slogan is “Kiwis First, But Only the Right Kind,” please at least run it past the marketing department. The marketing department will point out that a third of the education revenue, a fifth of total exports, and the biggest tourism recovery story all speak Mandarin. Some of us still have to live here. All of us still have to eat.

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