Faafoi KrisHon KRIS FAAFOI (Minister of Immigration): Like Dr Megan Woods I will be listening to some of the questions during the debate and bunching them up for efficiency. Can I just note the context in which we are in at the moment. Obviously everyone knows about COVID. But between 20 March of last year and 4 May of this year there have been 226819 arrivals at our border; for the subsequent time the previous year the usual arrivals of people into New Zealand were 7 million. So the effect of closing our border means we do have very constrained arrivals into New Zealand. We know the effect of that. We are obviously trying to manage that and channelling questions that I think may come within the next 20 or so minutes we understand that the border restrictions over that period of time have created difficulties for numbers of people who are unable to enter the border.Addressing the question from my colleague Jamie Strange in terms of industries who still require people to come into New Zealand that is obviously difficult when there are only 226000-odd people able to come into the country but we have been able to give border exceptions for those with critical skills; I understand to about roughly 17000 people—so whether that be by a border exception where individuals apply roughly about 10000 or 11000; by class exception where sectors are applying roughly 7000 through that. The types of sectors that we are talking about are heavily skewed towards the private industries and I would like to reinforce that given the perception that some have tried to create: that that is not necessarily those who are getting exceptions from officials under the criteria that exists at the moment.Addressing the question from Erica Stanford around the issue of the Ombudsman and the priority queue: no it is not acceptable and that is why the Ombudsman ruled in the way that he did. I have asked officials to review that situation to understand how it came about because I was not the Minister at the time and to ensure that that does not happen again. I think the fact that the Ombudsman made it quite clear that a decision was made and not necessarily brought to the attention of the Minister at the time is an issue. Again I have asked officials to report back to me about the situation.Mr McDowall raised an issue around sleepover rates which I want to make sure I address. We are working on that issue with Health. My understanding is that it is an unintended consequence of the application of wage rules. So if he is hearing concern from people that he is speaking to I think that might be valid. But officials with the assistance of Health are dealing with that at the moment.There have been a number of questions about the skilled migrant category (SMC) and wait times. There has been an unprecedented demand well above forecast for the SMC and we have put a bit of a perfect storm in terms of some of the processing. I would add that those SMC applications are not rubber-stamps; they are a very involved process where we have to make sure that the assessment of the officials to the criteria is done and that it is done thoroughly. So I think the perception that these things are easy to process is one that we want to make sure that we dispel but also given COVID there have been issues with being able to have staff available to process which also hasn't assisted issues.