Citizenship applications are, on the face of it, pretty straightforward. There are three basic requirements you need to meet. Live here long enough, speak English well enough, and not have some kind of criminal record that would disqualify you. Yes, there are more details and nuances than that, but these are basics of any citizenship application.
One would think that this should be relatively quick to process then. Just check their immigration history to see if they’ve lived here enough, do an English language test to see if they speak English well enough, and get a police certificate to check their criminal history. It sounds like something that could take about 2 or 3 weeks in a busy government department.
And yet it takes an average of 18 months to process an application. Not 18 weeks, 18 months. That’s a year and a half.
So what happened?
A significant part of it is that the Department of Internal Affairs is haunted by the same bugbear as Immigration New Zealand: ridiculously long backlogs. According to the DIA’s own estimates, as of the time of this article, they are only up to applications submitted in August 2023 in the queue. This article was written in October 2024 by the way, so you can start to see why it takes so long for anything to get done. If you were to submit a citizenship application right now, it would spend months just gathering dust in the queue without anyone looking at it. It is nearly impossible to get any information about what’s happening to your application during this time because the DIA hasn’t even looked at it properly yet.
So again, what happened?
We can only really speculate why this is happening. No doubt covid-19 will be blamed in some capacity. To be perfectly honest however, the truth is that the DIA is just cumbersome and inefficient. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Readers may recall how the DIA had extreme problems issuing passports at the start of the year. What used to take 10 days suddenly ballooned to taking 10 weeks, or about 2.5 months (and that’s not even including the extra time it takes to post the passports out to you!).
To be fair, covid did actually have some impact in this regard. The DIA reduced their staff since workloads were lessened during the lock downs. When the restrictions were lifted, they were never able to hire enough staff to keep up with the increased workloads again and it’s all been downhill ever since. To be truly fair however, a large portion of the blame is due to a poorly designed systems upgrade that was supposed to make things more efficient but instead made things worse (another bugbear it shares with INZ).
This highlights a problem shared by many government departments, they’ve turned into huge money sinks that eat up taxpayer money and struggle to meet expectations. This is forcing the DIA to downsize to try and save costs, reducing itself from 7 branches to 5 and removing over 600 employees in the process. Right now, the DIA only has 53 case officers available for citizenship applications. It’s really no wonder that they amassed such a gigantic backlog. If anything, we need to hire more staff instead of cutting them loose, but New Zealand is pretty much flat out broke. There’s a lot of hand-wringing and half-hearted excuses about why this is but its pretty clear that for some reason we’re inefficiently spending out public funds. Costs always balloon out way higher than predicted and there’s always time delays that result in even more costs down the line.
Heck, the DIA is planning on downsizing again in March 2025 so people should expect citizenship applications to slow down to an absolute crawl. They’re already taking a year and a half, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it creeps out to 2 years.
There is one thing that the DIA is really fast at when it comes to citizenship applications, at least. They tend to react as fast as lightning whenever they spot a potential issue in an application and they’re practically champing at the bit to have you withdraw so they can remove a pebble from their mountain of applications. They’re strict about making sure you meet your deadlines to respond to them, but you won’t hear anything back from them for months afterwards. When you finally do, it’s usually another request asking if you’d like to withdraw your application.
So what happens next?
This isn’t something that can be solved with a quick fix unfortunately. This is such a deep-rooted systemic issue that it’s very tempting to want to burn it all down and hope something sprouts from the ashes, but that’s not going to solve the core issues.
The DIA is trying to make things more efficient with upgrading its technological systems but as with the passport problem, it doesn’t seem to be working. We really need to replace whoever does the IT for our government. The DIA is always crying out and saying that if your application is straightforward then it will be much faster to process, but they should be doing more to help ensure that applicants are submitting unproblematic applications. Provide better checklists and information upfront so people know what to prepare in advance, rather than having to waste time processing it and then having to request more documents. Suck it up and hire more staff, there’s clearly not enough to handle the massive back log of applications. There’s a lot of things that could be done, but instead we’re expected to just twiddle our thumbs for almost 2 years for each citizenship application.
Recently, the “fix” seems to be to send out gratuitous email after gratuitous email on a monthly basis which expressly states “There are no updates at this stage-…”. Soul destroying stuff for all concerned.
It really feels like we as a nation have become too complacent. We almost expect things to happen slowly and with a lot of delays, as if it’s supposed to be that way. It’s hard to work up enough of a damn to be mad about the latest construction delays anymore, for example. At this rate New Zealand will quietly slip back into mediocrity, the backwater country people forget exists. Donald J. Trump would fire the whole department.
Our lawyers can make a difference.
We may be able to assist with cases with exceptional circumstances. We can also seek managerial intervention in cases which have become too protracted. We are tenacious and we do not give up.
But generally, for those applying directly, who have, say, diligently paid their taxes after securing their residency 5 years earlier (and may well harbour a secret desire to relocate to Australia, the “lucky country”) do not hold your breath. Notwithstanding the legal doctrine of reasonable expectations should apply, you may well be waiting for one to three years to get the cherished black passport.
In any case, Queen City Law are experts in the immigration sector, and this naturally extends to citizenship applications as well. We have dealt with many cases, some mundane and some unusual, and we have achieved exemplary results every single time. For a particularly notable example, we helped fast-track an athlete’s application to help her get her citizenship in time for the Winter Olympics. Her application would have been brought down into the baneful bog of belated bureaucracy and she wouldn’t have been able to compete and represent Aotearoa, if not for our direct submissions and appeals to the Minister’s office. We bring a level of dedication and decisiveness that helps drive applications home.
Obtaining citizenship is a significant change in your life. If you don’t want to leave it to chance, you should leave it to us at Queen City Law.