Kiwi wings clipped? The confusing new rules around dual passports

“I need to see your British passport.”

Such is the demand the estimated 200,000-plus dual British citizens living in New Zealand now have to get used to, if and when they wish to visit their other country.

Same goes for across the Irish Sea, where the centre-right government of Micheál Martin simultaneously adopted the same policy for Irish citizens from New Zealand looking to enter the republic.

The good old days of all New Zealanders using the “beautiful black Kiwi book” for our travels are over.

The pause at the airport counter is short but what it implies is big, and sooner or later everyone heading for the departure gates will also be dealing with what it conveys.

Especially so in my case, alas, because I tick all of the relevant dual national boxes. Born in Hutt Valley to a British father and an Irish mother, I’m in an extremely small subset of the dual nationality subset. From birth, I was automatically a citizen of both parents’ countries as well as of the one I was born in.

Throughout my adult life, though, this has felt less like a practical advantage than a sentimental one: a colourful inheritance, sure, or something to bang on about at a dinner party, but mostly an abstract attachment as someone who lives and works in Wellington. The past felt like another country.

Now, however, what was merely a family footnote has become the clincher in whether or not I can get on a plane. Granted, it’s a particular issue at the moment for people like me – but if you think that’s where it is set to remain for everyone else, meet 2026.

Flight Centre’s Heidi Walker: Photo / Supplied

Having a Kiwi passport has always been “a great gift”, says Flight Centre’s New Zealand manager, Heidi Walker, “but the rules will continue to move for everybody”.

How simple it all used to be. As a New Zealander making only relatively short trips abroad, I had always enjoyed the luxury of relying on a single document at airports and foreign border posts.

Not only has my preferred passport been the obvious choice, it has long been recognised as one of the world’s loveliest. The Henley Passport Index, which ranks 199 passports across 227 destinations, placed ours equal-seventh in 2026, allowing Kiwis visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 183 places. (Or 182 in my case, since Russia sanctioned me over a column about Ukraine.)

Those rules changed abruptly on February 25, when dual British or Irish nationals were first required to travel using only a valid passport from either the UK or Ireland rather than their New Zealand one. The electronic travel permission system, introduced last year as part of the UK’s border digitisation programme, no longer offers a workaround.

Other than going to continental Europe and hiring a dinghy to cross the English Channel, are there any other options for anyone stubbornly attached to using a Kiwi passport? Sort of, but not much.

The British High Commission in Wellington says you can either fork out about $1400 for a certificate of entitlement (COE) – essentially formal proof of your right of abode inserted into a foreign passport ‒ or spend roughly the same amount renouncing one’s British or Irish citizenship altogether.

Decisions, decisions. A new British (or Irish) passport costs about $400. But for anyone who has not, until now, held one as an adult, there is also the cost in time as the application gets processed.

Fiddly documents must also first be unearthed — your birth certificate, obviously, and your father’s, too, if you were born before 1983. Or either parent’s birth certificate if you were born after that.

In the British case, you also need to show your parents were married, which sounds straightforward to verify but sometimes can be anything but.

The British high commissioner who oversaw the change in New Zealand, Iona Thomas, has since completed her diplomatic posting. In a statement, her former office says the new requirements form “part of a global update to the UK’s immigration settings, designed to strengthen border security while ensuring a smoother and more consistent experience at the UK border”.

Many countries, it adds, “already operate similar systems and require dual nationals to travel on their passport of nationality” – including, not incidentally, New Zealand itself, where Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has recently signalled immigration rules are an emerging political issue and that voters can expect a “careful” new policy ahead of this year’s general election.

The practical message, however, is plain enough for we Briwis: “Anyone who has ever held British citizenship should check their travel documents early and apply in advance for a British passport or COE where needed. UK authorities will continue working closely with airlines and partners to support travellers and help people plan ahead with confidence,” says the high commission.

The change arrived with surprisingly little fanfare, catching out not just dual nationals but much of the travel industry. “We had only six weeks’ notice before the change,” Flight Centre’s Walker says with a slight frown. Even at that point, the country’s biggest travel agency heard little from the relevant diplomatic missions and was left scrambling, Walker says, “and basically just having to follow media reports”.

The refusers

Five months on, most paying customers appear to have figured it out. The knotty cases have tended to involve the unknown number of dual nationals who, for various reasons, can’t or won’t do the paperwork needed for a first-time passport application and therefore have ditched any future travel plans altogether.

British-born Cantabrian Mark Stocker, a 70-year-old long-term resident of New Zealand, says many friends and contemporaries who may otherwise have been visiting the old country in the coming months fall into this category. The retired academic reports his British family members are “ashamed of their government” for the emotional havoc he believes the new policy is causing.

Stocker, who himself won’t be getting a new British passport, mentions a friend born here in the 1950s to naturalised British parents, who has only ever used a New Zealand passport, who “flew into an absolute blind panic” on hearing of the changes.

But he says the biggest impact might fall on someone who emigrated to New Zealand as a child, whose original British passport (assuming they had one) has long since expired, and who doesn’t know where to begin in sourcing the required documents for a new application.

Could someone simply game the new system by fibbing a bit about the dual national stuff? Walker sounds doubtful. Flight Centre now insists on sighting passports before issuing tickets, and staff are expected to keep an eye out for telling details, such as place of birth.

If, for example, your passport says you were born in Glasgow or Tunbridge Wells, the administrative inference would be obvious. Still, there’s the other sort of dual national ‒ the one whose birthplace reads Hokitika or (gulp) Upper Hutt.

“Sure,” Walker says, “but getting caught out may only be an AI sweep away.” And were that to happen, “you would certainly be a ‘return to sender’ from Heathrow”.

Airplane. Photo / Getty Images. Illustration / Listener

Tracking in asia

Other emerging issues interest Walker. The European Union’s European Travel Information and Authorisation System, due to apply to New Zealand passport holders from October, is merely the latest addition to a steadily lengthening list of electronic travel authorisation (ETA) requirements ‒ joining the likes of Indonesia, South Korea and Sri Lanka, along with the US and, naturally enough, the UK ‒ that travellers now need to cough up for.

“Globally, a great many countries are becoming more interested in who is coming in and out, where they are coming from, and [requiring] rather more background information than they used to.”

Wellington immigration lawyer John Petris agrees, mentioning what he sees as the growing pile of bureaucratic obstacles that have begun creeping into corners of travel most of us would not expect to find. The trend, he says, is unlikely to reverse in places such as the UK, where politicians on every side are in near meltdown over immigration policy.

Increasingly, Petris suspects, applications are not being assessed by case officers in the old-fashioned sense at all. Instead, it often feels like a computer has settled the matter before a human gets anywhere near it. “I think AI, or something much like it, is probably already operating in the background,” says Petris, a dual Kiwi-Greek national. He rattles off recent examples of clients who have encountered unexpected and often unexplained snags.

For him, Britain’s digital border regime is no outlier. It’s a sign of what’s already here. Not only for Kiwis travelling overseas but for people trying to get into New Zealand.

He has spent “months” working on a five-year visa for a mother in the US who wants to come here to spend more time with her daughter ‒ a saga that began when the mother was first in New Zealand and tried to apply, only to be told she had to lodge the application from the US, where she currently remains in Connecticut, taking required medical tests, spending piles of dosh on the immigration process and pulling out her hair.

Escalating costs

John Carmichael works in the oddly specific but suddenly less obscure world of Kiwi-British visa advice, a line of work he says he more or less “fell into” while on his OE in London in 2000. These days, he specialises in citizenship questions relating to the UK — a field that, in 2026, looks decidedly less niche. The numbers alone are enough to sober the romantic. A youth mobility visa for the UK will now set you back about $4000, while a five-year ancestry visa costs about $13,000, thanks in large part to the ever-swelling NHS surcharge.

And don’t even get Carmichael started on the latest passport palaver. His phone “went nuts” with panic-stricken clients in the weeks after February 25. “It absolutely blew up with queries: people saying, ‘My dad was born there, and I didn’t know this … or this … or this.’”

Things have quietened down a little since, but the hard-luck stories keep coming in about missed flights, frantic searches for documents and the occasional would-be traveller still insisting they will simply chance it. His advice to the last group: “Don’t.”

“I think they are simply going to continue down the road of digitising everything on the UK side,” he says, “building not just an electronic wall around the British Isles, but a record of British citizens around the world.”

It may not be long, he adds darkly, before other parts of the state begin taking an interest, too. “Everyone’s jumping on board.”

Or not jumping on board. He mentions a retiree from Auckland, who can never again visit Britain because of a previous conviction for cannabis possession back in the 1970s. Under another apparently inflexible border policy introduced on the watch of former prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020, anyone with such a conviction “must” be refused entry.

Just another reminder ‒ if one is needed ‒ of how border checks now start long before you get to any border. The hard part happens before you leave home. Just ask the airline staffer behind the computer.