This post on page 8 of this thread shows they are currently processing September/October 2020.
Well we (both) replied to this ambiguous email with a very brief 'my contact details are up to date' for the avoidance of any confusion, and received confirmations in early and mid-June respectively that our applications were 'approved'. Since then, silence.
Our next citizenship ceremony is late August and the one after that is November, so getting slightly impatient I phoned an 0800 number this morning which got me an email address, to which I enquired about the August ceremony. I've got a response today suggesting we might get an invitation. It took 10 months from application to approval and (if we go in August) 1 year and 3 weeks from applying to completion, and we are very straightforward cases.
I still can't fathom what takes so long, surely once you've been approved it should be very simple to allocate you to a ceremony not a 2-5 month wait, they could even let people go online and book themselves? That way they might spend less time responding to OIA requests from disgruntled would-be citizens and more time processing applications.
Whatever. Hope it is all over soon. Good luck everyone else who is waiting.
But the ceremony part isn't dealt with by DIA, it is the local council that runs them and invites the people (at least that was my understanding). I can't rememberexactly any more, but I thought we got our approval letter (by post, not email), then anotherletter with the date and time ofthe ceremony. Mind you, it is almost ten years ago now, so everything might have changed.
While the Department of Internal Affairs doesn't provide much detail, I found some juicy tidbits on the Upper Hutt City Council website that indicates that this is a joint effort.
It appears to work as follows:
- Once there is a certain threshold of candidates awaiting a ceremony, DIA notifies the local council. (Note that the Upper Hutt City Council states that the allocation of candidates to ceremonies is DIA's responsibility.)
- The local council then prepares to host the ceremony, and provides DIA with the date and any other pertinent information.
- DIA is responsible for notifying the citizenship candidates about their ceremony date, location, and any other details required for the candidate to attend.
- The local council hosts the ceremony, and the candidates pledge their allegiance to New Zealand and receive their certificates. While not explicitly mentioned, I can imagine that this would require considerable co-ordination between the local council and DIA. Also, INZ would need to be kept informed because, by law, they must cancel the visas of all the candidates once they become citizens.
Might be other corroborating information on other local council websites, haven't checked.
Wonder if like the residency queue is the government purposely making citizenship processing slow to mitigate brain drain to Australia and other countries…
When I submitted my application last week, I had a chat about this with the woman who reviewed my application. She told me that prior to March 2020, the processing time was much shorter. Then DIA had the trifecta: massive increase in applications, covid lockdown, and implementing a new online application system. It resulted in a massive backlog, that they are still struggling to clear. She said they had borrowed some workers from passport processing for a while while travel was more restricted, but now that passport applications are back up to normal, they lost them again. They just hired a bunch more workers, so hopefully things will pick up soon. I don't know if that is truly the reason, but that's what they're telling people.