Oh, sure - it's possible to rationalize. But to be blunt and cynical, I *think* that notification went up there last December, when INZ were in the first throes of the flood of applications (a whole lot of which will have come from the USA and the UK in the aftermath of the extremely odd current political situations in both countries which were becoming more and more obvious around then, as well as concerns in other parts of the world) in the hope of discouraging people from applying and adding to the problem - INZ managers must have been able to see that their system was being swamped, and would know that their current staffing levels couldn't be raised in the short term (it takes time to train a CO).