Supporting my partner - residence visa. Do I need to send in my original passport?

[SkyLight]

Good day! I am a residence class visa holder, and my husband is on a partnership based work visa issued last year. We will now apply for his residency, because we now have enough "evidence" to prove that we have been living together for more than a year (we have lived together back in our home country but only for a few months). Also, his work visa is about to expire in a few months.

Now the catch is, my passport is about to expire, and therefore I had it renewed recently, but in our case would take 8-12 weeks apparently for me to receive my new passport (frustrating!!!). So right now all I have is certified true copies of my identity page and visa page which I made sure I had before sending in my old passport.

Therefore my question is: seeing that one of the requirements for me to support my husband's application is to provide "original and certified true copies" of my visa and passport, then would this mean I have no choice but to wait months for my new passport in order to push through with his application? Or could we go ahead and submit all the documents required (which we already have prepared and all ready to go)? This has got us worried since even if I receive my new passport I still would have to get the visa label transferred which I'm not sure how long that would take as well.

Thank you very much for anyone who can give us a few ideas. Long time lurker here, this forum helped us a lot when he applied for his partnership based temp visa, which he got in 5 days within lodging back at our home country. Too bad it's looking as thought it's going to be a more challenging road this time applying for his residency.

[JandM]

Interestingly, the INZ operational manual, when talking about evidence of the partner's status, says 'original OR certified copies', as you can see here. http://www.immigration.govt.nz/opsmanual/30880.htm

[gourav]

@Skylight Haha that's my old story

You are in same boat as I was in Last year and good news is do not worry go ahead with certified copies of your old passport.
But make sure you do mention it in your cover letter and if possible provide reference/File number of your new passport application.

I did the same last year and got visa for my wife in 20 days for your information I received my passport back after the application
was already made for my wife.