Michael Wood
Auckland, June 23, 2024
At my first meeting with government officials as Immigration Minister in mid-2022, I told them that re-opening the Parent Resident Visa category was a top priority and they needed to get to work on it.
I knew from my work as Mt Roskill MP and through relationships in the New Zealand Indian community that this was a major issue for many families. The category had been frozen by National in 2016 with thousands of cases banked up. It was due to be re-opened in 2020 but then Covid hit and the borders were closed. Many families were desperate for a pathway to help their parents settle here.
The officials did not want to do this and believed there were other priorities. I made my expectations clear and by the end of the year, we re-opened the category with settings that were somewhat more generous than the planned re-opening in 2020.
Benefits of family integration
The Parent Resident Visa category has since helped many families to bring their parents to New Zealand, which has benefits for family integration, employment opportunities for working parents, and the well-being of the parents. The visa category is however limited, primarily by income thresholds. These are important because we believed that it was important to have assurance that potentially elderly parents arriving as residents could be looked after by the sponsoring family.
While this is an important safeguard for a residency visa, we indicated that we would do further work on a more flexible and longer-term visitor parental visitor visa as a way to assist families who could not meet the income threshold for a residency visa.
By the time of the 2023 election, both Labour and National proposed broadly similar policies. Labour would have provided a 10-year multi-entry visa with a requirement for medical and public liability insurance.
This sounded like good news for migrant families – whoever won the election, there would be movement on this issue. Both parties made it clear it would be a priority.
Priority dismantled
But last week, there was bad news with confirmation that the government is backsliding on its commitment. Under questioning from Labour’s Phil Twyford, Immigration Minister Erica Stanford confirmed that policy work on the issue will not even start until 2025.
Consultation and policy work usually takes many months, and that is before a Cabinet consideration process that usually takes several months, and then Immigration NZ needs to update systems for implementation (usually several more months).
All told, this makes it very uncertain whether there will actually be a change for people before the end of 2025. After that, we are into the vagaries of election year.
For a policy that was given great prominence in National’s pitch to migrant communities before the election, this represents unjustifiable back-sliding from the government. There is no good reason for it, and it appears to simply be a lack of prioritisation.
As indicated, I was able to get the Parent Residency Visa open within six months through clear Ministerial direction. Erica Stanford could do the same if the Parent Visitor Visa policy was a real priority to her.
Communities need to make their voices heard and their expectations known to prevent further backsliding.
Michael Wood was Immigration Minister in the Sixth Labour government. He writes a regular column for Indian Newslink.
