SpeechCHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members the House is resumed in committee. When we rose for the dinner break—look at everybody so keen! I'm not just quite ready for you but we'll get there. When the House rose for the dinner break we had just finished with the Minister of Justice and now the Minister of Immigration is now available for 30 minutes to respond to members' questions. ImmigrationNAISI CHEN (Deputy Chairperson of the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee): Thank you Madam Chair. Indeed I am very eager to get up and make my contribution to this part of our process in terms of reviewing our Budget and our whole entire scrutiny over the finances of our Government. Can I start by once again thanking all the officials that have worked with the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee. It gives me great pride to once again take a call in this House as the deputy chair of that select committee. I know we've just recently had some changes in personnel so I do want to say thank you to Glen Bennett as well for his contribution to this select committee.But the immigration portfolio is a very interesting portfolio whereby the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee oversees MBIE—so the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment so hence we get to scrutinise over the Vote of business science and innovation. However our colleagues who sit on the Education and Workforce Committee also have oversight in this matter as well. So I do want to thank that select committee as well for the other piece of work that you'll be doing at the beginning of the Budget cycle in terms of the appropriations reviews so we do kind of do a bit of a tag team in this sense.So we heard from the officials from MBIE and recognising that they too have had a really really tough time during COVID—so we thank them here in the House and we thank them for their contributions and for their persistence through all of this as well. During the select committee process we had heard—obviously I think to no surprise of anyone—a lot and we asked a lot of questions on the resident 2021 visa (R21). We had been really cognisant of the full effect that COVID had had on this whole entire immigration application process and knowing that this visa means a lot to many people in our community especially many who have weathered COVID with us—many of our essential workers as well who have really been at the front line. And I think that is a real chance for us to thank them for their contribution and to I think permanently welcome them to the Aotearoa family. So I think this is a very important time for us to make sure that we roll out R21 visas and the whole entire application and the grant process in the most efficient way possible.When we did the review with MBIE that was at the beginning of seeing a couple of cases in the community for Omicron and we knew that Delta had been really disruptive for the Immigration office. So we had asked a lot of questions about whether this time Omicron would be any different whether it would be any different in terms of the delay in processing times whether it would be any different from the way that the officials worked in terms of immigration officers and whether they would be able to work from home. And I think we were really really happy to hear about the digitalisation of this whole entire process and that most of the applications can now be all done online so that if our immigration officers had to work from home then they would be able to access most of this information from online and from the safety of their own home instead of having to worry about taking confidential information home in a paper based form or when back in Delta they weren't able to basically take much home and many of our Immigration officers actually had to go into the office to work on essential and very urgent applications. So we thank them for their continued revamps and continued innovation in this area to make sure that we are able to serve our applicants in the most timely way possible.Obviously we had a few concerns around the target of meeting 80 percent of the applications by the end of 2022—so December in 2022. And we had a lot of assurances from the officials in that they have now allocated 105 staff members to processing the phase 1 applications and then they were also training 100 additional staff for processing phase 2 of those applications. So that's really reassuring to be able to hear that from all the officials.Also we note that there's the working holidays that Immigration New Zealand has been working on and all of the other broader phases including for our international students as well. So on that note I'd like to thank the officials once again and I'd really like to thank all my colleagues on the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee for working with us through this process.