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The Green Party is calling on New Zealand Cricket to back England in their effort to kick Zimbabwe out of next year's Twenty20 World Cup.
The International Cricket Council is currently meeting in Dubai and New Zealand Cricket CEO Justin Vaughan is present.
NZC spokesman Steve Addison said
the topic of Zimbabwe's inclusion in the Twenty20 World Cup and New Zealand's tour next year will come up for discussion.
Green Party MP Keith Locke said cricket is another way to leverage the Robert Mugabe regime, following the widely criticised election process that returned Mr Mugabe for a a sixth term as the country's president.
"Mugabe's thugs have just destroyed the run-off election, showing that he will stop at nothing to stay in power. The maximum international pressure now must be exerted on the regime, with New Zealand doing what it can to help," Mr Locke said.
He said Zimbabwe should not be included in the Twenty20 World Cup and New Zealand should not be touring Zimbabwe in July next year.
The New Zealand Government would also like to see the tour stopped and Zimbabwe out of the Twenty20 World Cup.
A spokesman for Foreign Affairs minister Winston Peters, James Funnell, said nothing has changed since the last tour in 2005.
That tour went ahead despite the Government asking New Zealand Cricket to stop the tour. New Zealand Cricket would have faced financial penalties in the millions of dollars if the tour had gone ahead and some of that would likely have gone to the Zimbabwe cricket board.
Mr Funnell said there is no way of preventing individuals from travelling, providing they have passports.
"It still doesn't change in that we can't stop them but it adds more moral authority to our argument that there shouldn't be any normalised relationships with Zimbabwe," he said.
Mr Funnell said he hopes the ICC ban Zimbabwe to save governments around the world from making moral decisions for their cricketers.
Last week the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) cancelled Zimbabwe's proposed tour of England in 2009, citing political unrest in that country as the reason.
New Zealand Cricket Players Association executive manager Heath Mills said the association does not have a stance on the tour because players are contracted to attend all games and ICC events.
"We can't pick and chose what tours the guys play in," Mr Mills said.
He said no players had approached the association with concerns about the tour but given they have been in England on tour for three and-a-half months, that is not surprising.
"I expect that is something we will discuss closer to the time," Mr Mills said.
He said players earlier in the year had approached the association to say they were unhappy that Zimbabwe players had not been paid for the past four to five years.
"Our guys were pretty disappointed in that and they questioned whether they [Zimbabwe] should be involved with ICC cricket," Mr Mills said.
He said the ultimate decision comes down to the Government.
"If the New Zealand Government wanted to come out and say: Well, listen, we don't want any sporting ties with Zimbabwe cricket, then New Zealand Cricket would have to follow that and they would report that to the ICC and we wouldn't be required to honour that obligation," Mr Mills said.
He said it is easy for a Government to say they don't want a tour to go ahead.
In 2005 the then Green Party co-leader Rod Donald asked New Zealand Cricket to pull out of a tour to Zimbabwe.
The letter to then NZC CEO Martin Sneddon said: "As you probably know, Robert Mugabe is the patron of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union and is a big cricket fan. Being able to receive international cricketing teams therefore not only brings him personal pleasure but also bestows on him respectability he does not deserve."
