More than 30,000 waiting for visas

WELLINGTON: Thousands of travellers are waiting for a visa, as figures showed only one in five requests were approved in the month after the border reopened.

Immigration New Zealand (INZ) says it is trying to speed up tourist visas, after 38,000 people applied to visit New Zealand and fewer than 7000 received visas.

Some have now waited more than five weeks to find an answer, among them families waiting for parents and grandparents to visit.

An incident management team was set up at INZ at the end of last month to deal with visa processing delays, including IT issues.

Pushpinder Singh Sappal, whose parents are among those waiting, has worked in IT for a decade and said he had never seen a worse platform and automation as the INZ portal and process.

It was one older people would struggle to navigate, he said.

‘‘The fully automated system is not working, or it can’t handle that load of applications.

‘‘If you’re trying to launch a system for say, 10,000 people, we do our testing for about 15,000 people,’’ he said.

‘‘We don’t test for 4000 people and then expect it will work for 10,000.

‘‘This is quite a basic understanding. It’s a common sense thing.’’

Visitor visas previously took days, not weeks, he said.

Damian Wilson’s parentsinlaw in South

Africa applied the moment the border reopened.

They have four children and 10 grandchildren in New Zealand and were planning a threemonth trip next month.

They have visited many times before, have a house and family in South Africa but after a fiveweek wait, they were declined.

The reasons given suggested they posed a risk of overstaying.

‘‘I’m just baffled as what actu

ally the risk is, and how do you prove otherwise? ’’ he said.

INZ deputy secretary Alison McDonald said demand for visitor visas had been higher than expected.

She said INZ had forecast about a third of the applications they received in the first couple of weeks of the border opening.

‘‘We talked to other countries who opened before us and we kind of took a best guess, to be honest . . .’’

The delays were related to the number of applications and were not because of staffing issues, she said.

‘‘In terms of visitors coming to New Zealand, over 285,000 people have applied to come to visit New Zealand and around 250,000 of those can travel, because most of them are from visawaiver countries.

‘‘So what we’re talking about is the 45,000 people who did need to apply for a visitor visa and we’re working through those.

‘‘We’ve approved nearly 10,000 of them so far.’’

INZ were working on process improvements to automate some of the work, she said. — RNZ

❛ We don’t test for 4000 people and then expect it will work for 10,000