New Zealand Immigration News: June 2009

Upcoming New Zealand Immigration Seminars

Paul Janssen, Consultant B.SocSc (Hons) (Licence No. 200800705) will be in South Africa and Singapore in July giving a series of seminars for those of you, your friends or family who are interested in migration to New Zealand. Given the almost historic low pass marks the opportunity exists for many more people to qualify for permanent residence without needing job offers. The beauty of this of course is that it does open up to you a four to five year pathway before you actually have to sell up and settle here. It has to be worth looking at for those people who are seriously contemplating a move.

SOUTH AFRICA

Auckland Fourth Best City For Quality Of Life

A recent survey by Mercer has placed Auckland at fourth equal for quality of life. Mercer does an annual survey for those companies moving staff around the world. Vienna came out on top, Zurich and Geneva second and third and New Zealand came in fourth equal (with Vancouver).

The quality of living ranking covers 215 cities. You may be interested to know that Bagdad perhaps not surprisingly ranked bottom. I understand Johannesburg ranked 92.

Auckland ranked top for the Asia Pacific region with Sydney coming in tenth, Wellington twelfth, Melbourne eighteenth and Perth twenty-first.

As a matter of interest there are no Middle Eastern or African cities in the top 50.

The survey takes into account political, social, economic as well as environmental factors.

In another report released a week or so ago Auckland is ranked twelfth as the “best city to live in” according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Livability Survey. Wellington comes in twenty-third. The survey looked at 140 cities around the world and ranked them according to stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.

Bottom line is Auckland seems to rank extremely favourably as a place to live. As if those of us living here didn't already know…..

New Zealand Immigration Skilled Migrant Category Update

Pregnant Women, Ministers And Misinformation

Much has been made recently of a number of cases of women in New Zealand on Temporary Permits, i.e. Visitor's, Student or Work Permits, who have applied to extend their stay but have been denied because they are pregnant. The media lap up this sort of story, but it has been Government policy for some time. It may be a ridiculous and stupid rule, but a rule it is. What I simply cannot understand is why the media love to play the “tugging at the heart string” card and the Minister of Immigration does not simply come out and confirm that the policy that is in place was not the policy of this Government, but of the last. Minister Coleman continues to disappoint with some of his reactions around these stories. In the latest case of a Lithuanian visitor who did not particularly want to stay longer in New Zealand (so she says), but whose doctor ordered her not to fly given complications with the pregnancy, the Minister of Immigration came out and publicly castigated the Immigration Department for their decision not to extend or renew her Permit. I am usually the last one to defend the inconsistent and incompetent Immigration Department, but on this occasion I am with them. They had no choice and they had to decline the application on the grounds that the applicant is deemed by virtue of the pregnancy to have failed an acceptable standard of health. If the Minister believes it is a stupid rule then he should change it.

Overall, it is calculated by the Ministry of Health that those people in the country on Temporary Permits end up by consuming around $35 million in health. A large number I agree, but in the context of the $2.2 billion worth of economic benefit to New Zealand migrants bring with them, an overall health spend of around $13 billion per annum would appear to be small change.

Should we then be worried about the occasional temporary visitor who, horror of horrors, has the audacity to fall pregnant? It needs to be remembered that the offspring of non resident permit holders or citizens do not get citizenship or permanent residence by virtue of being born here, so it's highly unlikely anyone is planning on coming here, leaving friends family and support networks just to get pregnant.

On this one the Government needs to change the rule and get real. For more on this you may wish to visit my New Zealand Immigration Blog.

Doubling Of Parent Case Processing Time

This time last year we were being advised that Parent Family cases would take nine to twelve months to process. Many clients were advised of this by the Immigration Department, but have subsequently learned that cases will not even be looked at on average for two years after receipt. This has upset the plans of many hundreds of older applicants seeking to be reunited or to continue living with their New Zealand resident children. It is absolutely outrageous that people can be given an expected processing time and this then doubles without apology or explanation. At some point the Government and the Immigration Department might realize that applicants are people. They have plans to make. Simply taking the approach that these people are reference numbers on a piece of paper or “units in stock” who must sit in a queue and make no plans or organize their futures until their visas are issued shows a stunning arrogance and staggering misunderstanding of how the migration process works, but that is unfortunately what we deal with on a daily basis. The big question is of course these parents who have to wait in a two year queue just to be looked at, are they all going to be asked to repeat their Medical and Chest X-Ray Certificates? And what if during the time they were sitting in the queue their health may have changed to the point where the Immigration Department ends up by declining them?

Government has to accept that migration is a two-way street and many of these older people are secondary caregivers to skilled migrants recently settled in the country and the sooner we can get them here the more their own children are able to contribute to the economic and social fabric of New Zealand.

New Zealand Immigration Service Auditor General's Report

In May 2008 the then Prime Minister and then Minister of Immigration asked the Auditor-General to carry out an inquiry into the Immigration Department. There were some concerns and allegations about the integrity of the Department's operations.

Part of this inquiry related to investigating the actions of the (by then) former Deputy Secretary, but also some allegations of “systemic issues” within the Department.

The Report looked at the integrity and probity of the Department's systems, processes and practices before deciding who will be issued with a Visa or Permit.

The Auditor-General found that there was no widespread integrity or probity issues and overall Immigration Officers are “generally conscientious, honest and eager to act in good faith”.

A little more disturbingly, however, the Auditor-General found there was substantial variation across the Department in:

• The overall quality of the Visa and Permit decisions that were made.
• Specific on the job training provided to staff.
• The use of delegated authority.
• The approaches different branches used to reduce backlog.
• The systems and practices each branch used to make decisions (including how they assessed risk, how much and how information was documented, and how staff verified evidence submitted to support a Visa or Permit application) and;
• The processes used to check the quality of the Visa and Permit decisions that were made.

Overall the Auditor-General found that the “quality assurance processes were inadequate and could not effectively inform the Department about the overall quality of the Visa and Permit decisions that were made”.

The Department lacks a “clear set of core systems and approaches with steps and checks” across the various branches.

Furthermore, the Auditor-General felt that there was too much emphasis on the quantity of decisions rather than the quality of decisions. In addition, the pressure the staff were under to meet quantity decisions had an adverse affect on the quality of the decisions made i.e. they were often wrong.

The Auditor-General identified what he called a “silo” culture and poor management practices.

Had the Auditor-General spent ten minutes with us we could have told him that the various branches appear to operate their own fiefdoms and this isolation from one another which to widespread variation, not only in terms of the processes followed, but how policies and criteria are implemented. This inconsistency that we deal with on a daily basis is incredibly frustrating as clients cannot be certain that outcomes on similar applications within and between branches is ever going to be the same. Many of you are aware of my fourth golden rule (I don't care what your friends and family say about your eligibility or what you read on the Internet) and this is where it comes from. In the twenty years that I have been dealing with the Immigration Department this has never changed. Frankly, I have little confidence that the Auditor-General's Report will lead to any real change despite the political reassurances of the Beehive.

The Auditor-General found that twenty percent of decisions made were wrong and in some branches or divisions up to forty percent were wrong.

Once again this underlines the value of using a licensed Immigration Adviser – we know the rules, we know the policy and clients have a very strong advocate working on their behalf in order to ensure that the decision made matches the policy against which the applicant is being tested.

Queenstown: An Aucklanders Perspective

On a lighter note I have to share with you my experience of four days I recently spent in Queenstown with my wife. I often find that given the amount of time I spend sitting on planes, reading the same old room service menus in hotels and being a tourist overseas that when I am home I like to stay home. I decided, however, that I am becoming too much of an Aucklander and I needed to get out and see more of New Zealand so I could speak with more confidence about these places to clients. Last year I went to Wellington on a number of occasions and shared my thoughts and impressions at the time (overwhelmingly positive) in other newsletters. I haven't been to the South Island of New Zealand for twenty-two years, an admission of which I am deeply ashamed and decided to put right a fortnight or so ago.

Queenstown lies in Central Otago and is about two hour's drive west of Dunedin right into the middle of the Southern Alps. Although very much a tourist city, it could not be more different from Auckland. Where are all the Indians? Where are all the Chinese? And how could a city be surrounded by such impossible beauty?

Although Queenstown lies well over a thousand kilometers further from the equator than Auckland, it is in fact much drier. Annual rainfall is only about 400 millimetres. Only fifty kilometers further into those mountains the rainfall is even less and the land is brown, dusty and thirsty. Those of you who live in Africa will know what I mean when I describe the countryside and grass as being that savanna golden colour.

Queenstown itself is literally surrounded by mountains and sits in a valley formed by glaciers many millennia ago. It snuggles up to Lake Wakatipu which is 84 kilometres long and is the longest lake in New Zealand. The mountains that surround Queenstown at this time of the year are topped with snow and sheer rock faces and grass tumble down into the rivers, farmlands and vineyards below. The mountains are huge. The sky was, for four days, cloudless and windless and the air crystal clear. There was no humidity in the air which for an Aucklander is a strange thing. Even in winter we have humidity and while that keeps us 5 to 10 degrees warmer than Queenstown, it does mean that the winters here are damp. Although fine and sunny, I have not been so cold since I was last in London! But the cold in Queenstown was a dry cold. Perfectly manageable with appropriate clothing.

Day 1 we spent in a small gold mining town known as “Arrowtown”. Built in the 1850's and 1860's it was like something out of Disneyland or a film set. The old buildings have all been preserved and restored and Arrowtown sits on the banks of the Shotover River which in its time contained the highest gold bearing river deposits in the world. When the gold had largely been removed, Arrowtown slipped into a decades long slumber until the arrival of the modern tourist and it has undergone the most wonderful regeneration.

Day 2 we watched a few crazy tourists bungy jumping at A.J. Hackett's bridge in the Kawarau Gorge. We then drove up to Cromwell (about 50 k's) and on to Wanaka before returning to Queenstown over the Crown Range. The road over the Crown Range summits at a little over 1000 metres (there was snow!) and is New Zealand's highest sealed road. The views down through the Wakatipu Basin beyond Queenstown were far more beautiful than I could possibly describe. The photographs that I took (and my wife warned me if I pulled over and took one more she was walking home!) don't begin to do justice to the incredible beauty that surrounds the lucky folk of Central Otago.

Day 3 we drove to the little settlement of Glenorchy which lies up the far end of the Wakatipu Basin and is real “Lord of the Rings” country and, in fact, where a lot of the movies were filmed. I am told it is one of the ten most picturesque drives on the planet and that must surely be so. I have driven around Chapman's Peak out of Cape Town and that is certainly spectacular, but I am sorry Cape Town the drive to Glenorchy is something else. After a very disappointing muffin (it's one thing they could work on down there) my wife and I continued the drive into the mountains towards the Routeburn Track. This is one of many in the region which attracts day walkers and those people who like three, four or even longer walks staying in Department of Conservation huts. Along this ever narrowing road we entered an ancient beech forest. The trees were 25 to 30 metres high. The way the light filtered through the trees on to the moss covered rocks and earth below was truly beautiful.

On our last day we returned to the outskirts of Cromwell as we wanted to go to Mt. Difficulty, a local and very popular Vineyard. All around Queenstown through into Central Otago some of the best Pinot Noir in the world is produced. Some of their Pinot Gris is pretty tasty also, but for me it is the Pinot Noir and for which these vineyards are carving out a global reputation. This particular vineyard is, in part, established on old gold sluicings. It was 6 degrees outside, not a cloud in the sky, no wind, the café was warm and cozy, the food the best we had had (twice roasted duck and an antipasti platter for two!) with some very special Pinot Noir to wash it down. I nearly said to my wife to forget about the flight home, we needed another bottle or two before I would leave. I was, however, dragged away, for the afternoon flight back to Auckland.

I have never taken off from a more spectacular airport. Unlike when we arrived we took off over the Lake and banked hard left. The pilot must have been seriously straining pulling back on the controls to clear the mountain chain we had to clear. I swear we just cleared the sheer snow covered mountain sides before flying north towards Auckland. As far as the eye could see snow capped mountains rose from the Canterbury Plains and the Pacific Ocean; they appeared endless. The sun had just set when we took off and a very large, almost red, full moon rose over the Pacific Ocean and cast a pinkish glow over the Southern Alps. I think that memory will live with me forever.

I have always said that New York is one of those places that you must go to before you die. To that, you should add Queenstown.