Christchurch, New Zealand
Mon - Fri: 9:00 - 18:00 / On call on Weekends

KIWI@HOME emergency and health policy

We are operating as normal, but we are still maintaining a policy of sanitization and reasonable physical distancing because as always our clients and your cases are at the front of our minds and safety for everyone's health is our concern.

Much of our work can be done online and for several years now we have been doing much of our work online, so this is nothing new for us. We love to meet and chat with clients face to face, but the reality is that this is not necessary for effective immigration advice and associated work. If you really do need to meet face to face, we can arrange this, but if it isn't necessary, then lets enjoy working online.

How we manage the risk

  • We are encouraging as much of our work as possible to be done online
  • We maintain high standards of hygiene for ourselves at all times
  • Our systems are optimized for online work, and INZ's systenms as well can handle a large percentage of work done online
  • Clients can contact us, send and sign documents, chat and do anything else using a wide variety of technology platforms, for example e-mail, phone, text, FB messenger, Skype, etc

How does health issues like influenza or covid 19 affect your application?

During the Covid pandemic we experienced significant delays and of course the border was closed. For clients onshore, more was possible and we could still process applications. It really highlighted the need to be prepared and get the right advice first time as there were few second chances.

if you are offshore then everything will depend on how you will be affected by the border restrictions, but if you are planning to come to NZ longer term, to work or study for example, then you still may be able to do this if the border situation allows entry. 

Visa applications will likely be processed slower than usual and certain criteria may be added that means the process will be different to normal and much different to what you have done previously. During the covid pandemic we say around 50 ~ 60 changes in immigration law and policy a year. 

The main take-aways from the covid pandemic that are still relevant now are:

  1.  get organized early and make an application without delay
  2. profesisonally manage the process rather than gathering everything you think you need and proceeding based only on that. 
  3. be prepared to pivot and change direction quickly
  4. Don't rely on what was posisble previously or what someone else has done before

Resilience is key

We have invested a lot of time in making our systems relient to change. This means our clients can be reassured that whatever happens in the world, we can still continue with your application as long as INZ or NZ's immigration policy allows it.