Report from RNZ by Gill Bonnett
New documents show tensions arose between government departments over who should get border exemptions, and how the dairy industry lost out in favour of space and film projects.
The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) pushed back hard on proposals by the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), saying they seemed ‘arbitrarily limited to certain sectors’ and appeared ‘MBIE-centric’.
Several of the projects that received approval for exemptions, such as workers on space and scientific research programmes, fall under MBIE, as does Immigration New Zealand.
DairyNZ had its border request rejected in the run-up to calving last year, having asked for farm or herd managers already employed in New Zealand, who were overseas on holidays when the pandemic struck.