Is “The Sovereign” - the Queen - a New Zealand Citizen? It’s a strange question but one that goes to the heart of the question of why New Zealand should have its own head of state. Citizenship as a concept is equally given to all, with the notable exception of our head of state.
Citizenship is a republican concept. Like most ideas, its roots are in ancient Greece and were further articulated by the Romans, and spread out by their Empire. It wasn’t until the tumult of the 18th century though that citizenship became associated with the egalitarian concept we know it as today.
The alternative to a citizen, a subject, developed from feudal concepts of obligation by communities to their lord. Being born in a particular place resulting in a person being subject to a particular lord, that concept was expanded to being subject to the monarch themselves.
This idea was at the heart of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s, where King Charles I battled with Parliament over a number of issues, including the “divine right of Kings” - that a sovereign and a subject were separate concepts. Charles was eventually defeated and put on trial, during which he famously said:
“A subject and a sovereign are clean different things”
The execution of King Charles in 1653 led to the eventual supremacy of England’s parliament over the monarch and later Britain’s parliament that we know today. The divine right of kings as a concept died out, but a lot of its residual hang overs - such as sovereigns and subjects - are still with us today.
Fast-forward to the British Empire and the concept of a “British subject” came to mean anyone who owed allegiance to the British sovereign. As a result, the term turns up in our own Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 - one of the guarantees to Māori was that by signing the agreement, the Crown would grant Māori the status of British subjects.
A hundred years after the Treaty was signed, 1940, and the Empire and its Commonwealth were at war. Following that war, the break-up of Britain’s Empire saw new citizenship rules spring up as parts of the Empire became independent. New Zealand passed its own citizenship law in 1947, largely because Britain was about to pass a new nationality law. Even though they were legally separate, New Zealand citizenship remained symbolically linked to being a British subject, until New Zealand passed a new citizenship law in 1977, explicitly dropping all references to New Zealand citizens being British subjects.
Which brings us to our question: is the Sovereign, the Queen, a New Zealand citizen? First, the Sovereign as a position is established by our Constitution Act 1986. Section 2 of the Act defines our head of state as the “Sovereign in right of New Zealand”, that means the Queen in her role as Queen of New Zealand, a title established by the Royal Titles Act 1974. The Sovereign is clearly a legally distinct position from an ordinary citizen.
Second, in terms of the Citizenship Act 1977, the Queen simply doesn’t meet any of the requirements to be a New Zealand citizen. The total time spent in New Zealand all the Queen’s Royal tours is just six months. That is not to say though that it would be impossible for a Sovereign to be a citizen of New Zealand - just that it’s extremely unlikely.
