The Government is tipped to announce a reset on immigration in a pre-Budget announcement on Wednesday as businesses desperately short of labour plead with the Beehive for a faster turnaround of visa applications.
In some cases, businesses are waiting upwards of nine months for working visa applications to be approved - despite their feet being on the ground in New Zealand.
Jeff Tanner, who runs PukePine Sawmills in the Bay of Plenty town of Te Puke, said a fresh start was long overdue.
Tanner told AM he was short of about 20 workers due to visa wait times for his employees.
"Immigration [NZ] are really slow on the turnaround and we're just getting to the situation where I've got people that are ready to go, but the paperwork can't get done in time - so we're really up against it," he told host Ryan Bridge.
"My immigration consultant is saying that even for people coming from offshore - there's a three to nine-month wait time in terms of getting visas processed."
There needed to be more resources at Immigration NZ to turn around visas more quickly, he said.
"I think the Government actually needs to move a little faster and cut the red tape around immigration so that we can actually just get busy and get on with the work.
"The problem that you've got is that a work visa is basically bonded to a specific employer and a specific job title, and there's lots of red tape in there so if you want to change, for example, somebody who's got a work visa for a particular job to another job on the site, you have to get the visa amended.
"If they're bonded to the employer then they should be able to be flexible."
Appearing on AM with Tanner, Anu Kaloti from the Migrant Workers' Association added it has been asking for years for the practice of bonding visas to specific jobs to be scrapped.
"It's time for the Government to now stop attaching the visas… it would be much easier all around for the workers and the employers, too," she said.
"We also have workers in [the] thousands who still remain stranded offshore because they got caught due to the lockdowns, so it would've been a very good idea to bring those people back gradually and if they were already here, we wouldn't have such a big problem of skills shortages and worker shortages - so that's one thing the Government can still do."
The Government will make its pre-Budget announcement at 1:30pm.
