Immigration New Zealand has been ordered to reconsider a Tongan woman’s residence application after the Immigration and Protection Tribunal found the agency made a flawed assessment of her partnership status.
The woman, 25, who arrived in New Zealand in November 2023 on a visitor visa with her two eldest children, had applied for residence in September 2024 based on her partnership with her Tongan‑born husband.
The couple, who began a relationship in 2016 and have three children together, married in Tonga in 2023.
Immigration New Zealand declined the woman’s residence application on the grounds that she should have been included in her partner’s earlier immigration steps under the Pacific Access Category.
Immigration officials said she was eligible to be declared in her partner’s 2018 registration for the PAC ballot but was not included, and again eligible to be listed in his subsequent 2019 resident‑visa application but was omitted.
Those omissions triggered mandatory decline rules under the Family (Partnership) category.
The central question before the Immigration and Protection Tribunal was whether Immigration New Zealand had correctly determined that the woman and her partner were already in a partnership at the time he lodged both applications.
The Tribunal was tasked with deciding whether the partner was required to declare her as a partner in 2018 when registering for the PAC ballot, and again in 2019 when he applied for his resident visa.
However, the Tribunal ruled INZ was incorrect to find that the couple were in a de facto partnership at the time of the 2018 PAC registration.
While the pair were in a relationship and had a child together by then, the Tribunal noted they were not living together, their relationship was not publicly recognised, and they lacked the level of interdependence required to meet the definition of a de facto partnership under immigration instructions.
The Tribunal found the couple’s relationship, at that stage, did not amount to “a relationship in the nature of marriage,” meaning the woman did not have to be included in the PAC registration.
The Tribunal agreed that by March 2019—when the partner applied for his resident visa—the couple were living together and met the definition of a de facto partnership. As a result, the woman should have been eligible to be included in that 2019 visa application.
However, it found INZ failed to complete its assessment by not considering whether the partner’s non‑declaration of his partner in 2019 was done without an intention to mislead, and whether including her would or would not have changed the outcome of his visa application—both required under immigration instructions.
Because INZ had already declined the application on the earlier incorrect ground, it did not properly consider this second stage of the test.
The Tribunal cancelled INZ’s decision and directed the agency to reassess the woman’s application by an officer who has not previously been involved.
INZ must now complete its evaluation under the correct instructions, including determining whether the earlier non‑declaration was misleading and whether it would have affected the original visa outcome.
The Tribunal emphasised that while the appeal succeeded, this did not guarantee approval of the woman’s residence application. Her case will now return to Immigration New Zealand for full reassessment under the proper process.
