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New Zealanders abroad are scrambling to get home to their dying loved ones, and attacking the government’s slow shift to emergency managed isolation applications.
Photo: RNZ / Liu Chen
The system offers a lifeline to people who need to return home within seven days, but some wait much longer just to have their requests evaluated.
Not wanting to endure the current 10-week wait for spaces, Maikel said he requested to cross the ditch from Brisbane and see his mother seriously ill.
It became eligible this month when MBIE expanded its emergency placement criteria to include people with dying family members, people who need to care for children in unsafe situations, some critical workers and people caught in travel limbo.
However, he listened to the radio silence of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment after sending the request, and the additional information about his condition that they requested.
“Initially I waited two, three days and then I submitted a second application. Then my brother also made a request. At one point, he even put up a picture of my mother who was not so well, just to try to speed things up. But Still no response, “he said.
Maikel says a formal complaint was necessary before MBIE responded 10 days later requesting more information: her mother’s life expectancy.
Fearing he would have to endure another long wait, he said he started checking the allocation website every day for canceled reservations and was lucky, securing a room last week.
“But sadly, he’s already passed away, he had his funeral and I couldn’t attend any of them,” he said.
You have not yet received a response from the ministry’s emergency request team about your request or the email you now sent to cancel it.
MBIE aims to process emergency assignment requests within three business days, but that starts from the point of collecting “all necessary supporting evidence.”
RNZ has heard of four people who spent four to 16 days in limbo.
Samantha Gallagher spent more than a week waiting to find out if she could travel from Victoria to see her father-in-law, who was in hospice with stage four lung cancer.
When MBIE responded by asking about his life expectancy, his condition had seriously deteriorated.
When the request was accepted last Wednesday, he had already passed away.
“I called them every day … and every time we come by, it’s like you only get to the consultation part. They can’t see your application. They can’t see where it is in the process line. They told me, most of the Sometimes, they couldn’t escalate our request, we would just have to wait. Finally, one person said they could scale it for us and did nothing to us, “he said. .
In a statement, MBIE apologized for the delays experienced by some applicants.
As of yesterday, he had 27 applications at the top of the queue, where he had obtained all the “required evidence”.
He said there were 108 other cases in which he had requested additional information to make a decision and had not yet received it.
The requests were classified according to the emergency criteria, which means that the priority went to people with a serious risk to their health, who needed to provide critical care to a dependent person or could not legally remain in their current location.
MBIE was confident that most applicants weren’t experiencing long waits.
“The number of applications in the queue is manageable and the team is constantly working to address this, while simultaneously processing new applications,” he said.
“Steps to improve processing times include bringing additional resources to the team and moving from a highly manual system to a new streamlined process with the introduction of a new case management system.”
Samantha Gallagher said MBIE needed to “step up” because no one should have to go through the waiting and frustration that she had.
“It’s the fact that they don’t have enough staff. I know their hours are quite extended anyway, but the emergency assignment team, for something that has been put in as an emergency assignment, it’s just not enough,” he said.
Maikel wanted the application process to improve “quite considerably” and felt that the three-day application deadline was not good enough.
“They need to have a phone line to be able to reach them and at least ask questions. At the moment, there is a phone service, but the only answers are ’email and wait for them to respond.’ And the deadlines are just not ‘Not adequate: I think they should have a response time of 24 hours, “he said.
He believed that there should be “at least double” the number of rooms reserved for the emergency allocation.
MBIE said that processing applications was a “time consuming and sometimes heartbreaking” task, with decisions carefully considered by senior staff.
He said he would continue to review the number of rooms reserved for emergency allocation to ensure there are enough.
