Changes in Immigration Legislation
Immigration matters!
Kia Ora All… Four months down the track and it has been incredibly busy! One of the main items on my agenda has been changes in immigration legislation in the film industry.
On Thursday, April 26, Murray Milne and I attended a meeting organised by Film NZ and Immigration NZ about the new work visa rules (from April 30). The meeting was surprisingly interesting. Meetings were held in Auckland and Wellington with two sessions per region. The 24 attending the 2pm Auckland meeting comprised mainly TVC producers, who are directly affected by the new 14-day period. The 14-day requirement means that applicants with contracts in New Zealand for 14 days or less do not need to contact the guilds or do due diligence as to the availability of local film technicians; they can just apply directly to Immigration for a visa for any technical skill. We as a guild have no say. All the guilds made major submissions to Immigration to try and avoid this legislation being passed, but to no avail.
Beyond the 14-day exclusion period, current legislation requires all entertainment industry work visa applications to complete a copy of Immigration’s supplementary form and provide it to the relevant professional union or guild. If the guild has no objection to the application – we do nothing. This is called the ‘silent approval’ process. What this means for production companies is that they hear nothing for at least three working days. The producer does not know whether we have objected or not. So, if a production company were to put an application in on a Wednesday, they ‘might’ hear back from Immigration the following Monday, then they could also be dealing with an objection. In effect, productions can’t move forward. As we all know, pre-production time is limited and this process is not ideal for production companies.
To make this process even more cumbersome, Immigration have no urgency system and said they had no intention of adding one as they thought it would open a floodgate. Now, for those of us in the industry, ‘urgency’ and ‘deadlines’ are very much a part of our culture! However, we have found a number of production companies have chosen to continue with our letter of non-objection as they want to know immediately what our position is.
It was agreed by Immigration at the meeting that they would copy the guilds in as they approve ‘silent approvals’ to ensure that we indeed received the supplementary form. Interestingly, we have processed close to 30 letters of non-objection over the past month since the new process was introduced, but not been notified of one ‘silent approval’ confirmation from Immigration. I contacted Immigration 10 days ago (as at writing this article) to inform them of this with no response to date. This does pose the question that due diligence may be falling through the cracks. At the time, we were told that anyone who applied and got a visa without going through the guilds would have their visa revoked.
The letter of non-objection is still important for producers and often necessary when applying from countries like the Philippines, etc. The letter can speed the process up for them considerably. So, the overall sentiment from the producers was, “Why has it changed?” Immigration didn’t really have a solid answer to this although there was a nebulous answer that New Zealand needs overseas investment and that film production was part of this. The response to this was that the ‘main’ factors production considers in choosing New Zealand are predominantly the strength of the NZD, co-production treaties, locations, and tax advantages.
Other legislation also introduced on April 30 was the accreditation process. This would allow a domestic company or an international company, who are running a production or performance here, to offer non-New Zealand workers employment without the need for a case-by-case guild or union referral. We assume this will apply to larger overseas-worker employers such as Weta Digital but could be used by many others. Accreditation will initially last for one year then may be renewed for a two-year period. We will be supplied with statistics of numbers within each craft group that were brought in by each accredited company. We do not, however, expect these results to be furnished to us within the next 12 months. No doubt we, as an industry, will begin to feel the effects of this within the next 12 months.
To date, we have been notified of one company who has applied for accreditation. The cost to the production company in the first year is $1,430. As it is, this production company has not applied for one letter of non-objection from the Techos’ Guild in 2012 and three in 2011 at a total cost of $165. It will be interesting to see who follows suit or whether this is in fact a process that the production companies wish to adopt.
Attending a meeting in which fairly unpopular legislation was being imposed on the industry by Immigration, there was one positive highlight and it was the sense of unity in the room with concern for the survival of the guilds by the majority of producers. The general consensus being that the guilds keep the industry level and an acknowledgement from producers that our small but significant income stream is to be cut. This validation is a reminder of the important and respected position the guilds hold, and the imperative to strengthen, survive, and grow as a group so that we can continue to contribute to a healthy screen industry.
