NZ Passports

Take care all you long-term kiwis.

Passport change could affect 52,000
28 June 2006
By MERVYN DYKES

Up to 52,000 New Zealanders could have valid passports that will not allow them to enter the United States, even as transit passengers. This could leave them stranded in another country temporarily - as happened to Manawatu Standard feature writer Tina White on Monday.

She was unaware of the new US requirement for visitors to have passports with machine-readable barcodes. The missing barcode on her nine-year-old passport was not detected by her travel agent or the airline check-in staff at Wellington.

It wasn't until she was prevented from boarding a Canada-bound flight in Sydney that she learned of the barcode requirement. Even then she did not realise her flight would make a stopover in Honolulu, because it was not mentioned in her travel documents. As with most non-machine-readable passports, hers was issued outside New Zealand. The New Zealander was a resident of Canada until recently.

A spokesman for the Internal Affairs passport office, Tony Wallace, said yesterday that 2.65 million New Zealanders have valid passports.

When the US imposed its machine-readable barcode requirement on October 26, 2004, 4 percent of New Zealanders had the older-style passports or ones that had been issued overseas where the bar-coding machines were not available. Since then, the number of non-machine-readable passports had been reduced to under 2 percent, either by expiry or voluntary upgrades. The older passports have numbers beginning with the letters J or M.

'Our advice to holders of these passports who might want to visit or pass through the US is to get a new passport or a US visitor visa,' Mr Wallace said. He knew of no other countries enforcing the machine-readable requirement.

Passports could be obtained within 10 working days, but an urgent passport could be obtained - at a cost - in three days, or a callout service can even provide one the same day.

Mr Wallace said that soon the only overseas offices that would issue New Zealand passports were those in Sydney and the United Kingdom. Stranded passengers, or those whose passports had been lost or stolen, are issued with emergency travel documents that expire soon after their return home.

Ms White obtained a new passport in Sydney in three hours for $A324 and a few fast cross-town taxi rides.