If you want to get into New Zealand during the pandemic, it’s not that hard.
The government just needs to consider you to be a priority for a scarce managed isolation space.
Simplest is to be attached to a subsidised government programme. If a government programme falls over, there are real consequences. Political consequences. If private projects fail for want of critical staff, that is obviously less important.
Back in August, being a racetrack specialist mattered. The Provincial Growth Fund considered horse tracks critically important, so those workers got in.
But government racing priorities change with new coalitions, and the America’s Cup is on in Auckland. Its importance is as obvious as the dollars government and Council have thrown at it – about a quarter of a billion of them, regardless of business cases that struggled to show benefits in excess of cost even before Covid.
The argument for subsidising and prioritising the Cup is so powerful, they don’t need to explain it in a business case that stacks up, and they don’t need to revisit it when circumstances change.
Immigration New Zealand tells me that, as of the 21st of January, 753 people had been granted visas for travel into New Zealand for the Cup and a further 16 applicants were waiting on decisions. That is roughly equivalent to one in seven arrivals over one MIQ cycle – though MBIE has not yet told me how many MIQ spaces have been needed.
Being vital for projects involving racing or films could help your prospects for getting a space. A film about a horse race on a boat could tick all the right boxes.
Alternatively, if you worry that urgent need to enter the country might arise, cultivating a sympathetic media profile could be helpful. When 1.2 million Kiwis were born abroad and another million Kiwis live abroad, the number of legitimate urgent travel cases will always exceed capacity. Selection will be impossibly hard. Being featured on the news could help you while making the government’s selection job a bit easier.
Finally, if all else fails, being elected as a list MP might help, but it’s hard to tell. One MP took a spin on that roulette wheel in desperate circumstances and won, despite long odds. Lucky spins do happen.
Fortunately, scarce spaces in MIQ are allocated according to democratically chosen priorities. A bit of political pull is all you need to ease things along.