Fadi Hamdan, with his twin sons, who are waiting for citizenship. Photo: Supplied
Thousands of New Zealand residents are waiting up to 18 months to get citizenship, while others take a quarter of that time.
Fadi Hamdan, his wife and twin five-year-old sons will become citizens at a ceremony next month after waiting for a year.
The Auckland IT engineer, who comes from Jordan, said it was galling to see other people go through the same citizenship by grant process in four months - and some quicker still.
"There are people who get their citizenship in 10 days, exactly 10 days. It's not only a small amount of people, there are 600 people. So there is a special treatment going on, nobody knows about it."
He was disappointed at the time it took and at lack of information when he asked for updates, querying why his application had failed automatic checks.
While there were not many practical differences between permanent residence and citizenship, a New Zealand passport could make travel simpler for people from countries where visas were usually needed.
For Hamdan it became critical when his mother fell ill.
"I'm worried about going to see my dying mum. She had a stroke three times. I lost my father in October 2020 during Covid, because of Covid, and I don't want to lose my Mum.
"We are not asking for an exception, all we are asking for is to be treated fairly and kindly. It will mean a lot, to be honest. It's the last milestone that we were looking for since we arrived in the country."
As of 18 August, there were 29,200 applications awaiting an outcome. Of those 9161 were from last year.
A random snapshot showed that on 17 August this year, 179 applications were approved from 2021 and 238 from 2022.
The National Party's internal affairs spokesman Todd Muller said the backlog was similar to where it was last year, when assurances were given about bringing waiting times down.
People would approach their MPs concerned at why their applications had failed to progress.
"It just gives them a huge amount of anxiety because they've understood that now they can move from residency to citizenship, they're told they've got everything in order and then it just gets dropped into a big black hole and they don't hear anything."
Internal Affairs seemed to be processing recent applications first, which left those already in the queue waiting longer, he said.
Internal Affairs said it was analysing those who failed automated checks and categorising them to speed up the process.
Sixteen staff had been moved over to deal with the surge in passport applications and would move back there.
"The pipe coming into the organisation is bigger than the number of people that we have who are doing this work, particularly when you think about these are the same people who are also looking at the massive surge in passport demand that we've had," said Internal Affairs deputy chief of service delivery Maria Robertson.
Not requiring migrants from English-speaking countries to prove their language ability had sped up their applications, she added.
Internal Affairs said some applications would take longer if the applicant had changed their name, spent a lot of time outside New Zealand since obtaining residency or had committed offences.
Others could be rushed through in urgent situations.
"Some applicants may not have been required to understand English in order to obtain residency - citizenship legislation requires most applicants to have sufficient knowledge of the English language, so sometimes additional checks may be required.
"It is not always easily possible to tell why an application has not passed an initial automated check. It could be related to data from INZ or another government agency, or an answer in an application.
"Frontline staff who answer queries from applicants who have not yet been assigned a case officer do not have access to all the relevant information in an application."
