Dear Department of Internal Affairs,

Please can you provide the below information. I am a permanent resident of New Zealand, residing in Auckland and wish to know the below please.

1. I would like to know the current scheduled citizenship ceremonies for all venues in Auckland for the next 12 months please, from date of your response. Please list the venue name, and the relevant dates for each venue, as well as the current amount of applicants invited per venue, per date please.
Please provide the information in a table format with the following headers:
a.Venue name,
b.Date ceremony is scheduled for,
c. Amount of Applicants invited to date for this ceremony for the relevant date

2. I would also like to know how many applicants, who have been approved for citizenship to date, await to be notified for their ceremonies in the same region as question 1. As well as how many has been notified for their ceremony.

3. Why is there no functionality - like using the 'RealMe' account to track the citizenship ceremony process? And by tracking, I mean a close mirror to all the information available to the staff of DIA that work on these ceremonies. Why the secrecy to the applicant? I believe that Auckland council specifically do not avail this information for security reasons. What about the rest of New Zealand councils? What makes Auckland special?

Seems like this is existing information that can be made available to all online applicants as you have this information in a system currently. Instead of sending out generic emails of little value to your new to-be-citizens, allow people to use their login details and provide meaningful information that reflect the current system statuses, so people do not have to call and send emails all over the place. Your emails indicate that you have very high volumes of emails to respond to, the sensible thing to do is to provide a view to the applicants so they do not have to call or email.

When I say meaningful information - please do better than the citizen application process that simply moves from 'application received' to 'application approved' and do not expose any of the myriad statuses that is published on the immigration website and indicate no service level agreements or timeframes. Your customers will be far more at ease if they can see progress. Please consider this as a suggestion to work smarter, reduce unsatisfactory customers and share the information as it becomes available. Waiting for a monthly update is bizarre in today's day and age with all the technology available.

Yours faithfully,

Ms M Willemse