Dear Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment,

I would like to follow up on the SMC offshore applications topic with the recent development that happened with COVID 19 restrictions. Since the NZ government has introduced a traffic light system and announced that from the end of April 2022, anyone can travel to NZ if they satisfy the vaccine and other travelling requirements.

With the above, can you please advise INZ standpoint on

1) Processing offshore SMC applications that are in the non-priority queue from December 2018?
2) If April 2022 is the cut-off date for anyone travelling to NZ (with fulfilling the travelling requirements), then the offshore SMC applications should be processed from January 2022, given the number of applications that are in the queue?
3) If no decision has been taken yet on this, then when is the likely discussion and decision will be taken by INZ?
4) What is the INZ response to the people who submitted their application 3 years before and still waiting for any decision to be taken on their applications since there was lots of time and money involved in submitting it?
Appreciate your response to the above questions, please.

Yours sincerely,

Seenivasan Ramasubbu