Hon KRIS FAAFOI (Minister of Immigration): Early on in the global pandemic, the Government recognised that, despite our closed border, we needed to bring in people and their skills as it was safe to do so to support our economic, cultural, and humanitarian objectives. That's why we set up the class exceptions process to support key industries and services to meet their workforce needs while the border is closed. Overall, we've approved over 22,000 workers to come to New Zealand since the border closure, covering health workers, individual critical workers, and workers arriving under class exceptions. The total number of workers eligible for border class exceptions announced this year is 1,335. This includes exceptions that have recently been announced in the latest round where workers will only begin arriving in 2022. Therefore the number of arrivals is correspondingly lower at 565. 