Following efforts to recognise its impact, an apology for the tax was issued in English and Mandarin under Prime Minister Helen Clark in 2002, and was later delivered in Cantonese in 2023.
Following the example of anti-Chinese poll taxes enacted by California in 1852 and by Australian states in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, John Hall's government passed the Chinese Immigration Act 1881.
Richard Seddon's government increased the tax to £100 per head in 1896 and tightened the other restriction to only one Chinese immigrant for every 200 tons of cargo.
[3][4] After years of activism, on 12 February 2002, Prime Minister at the time Helen Clark offered New Zealand's Chinese community an official apology for the poll tax.
[6] The apology was re-issued in Cantonese by Liu on 13 February 2023 during a parliamentary Chinese New Year function, which was followed by poet laurate Chris Tse reading a poem about the journey of his great-grandfather to New Zealand, who had been made to pay the tax.