Zealand without a travel document that meant that a grant of citizenship was, realistically, the only means to relieve his, and his family’s, humanitarian predicament.102 Finally, I note that s 9(1)(c) uses the language of discretion – “may”. But it is surely unthinkable that a Minister of the Crown, having concluded that the grant of citizenship to a particular person is positively in the public interest, would refuse to authorise the grant. Section 9(1)(c) therefore likely falls within the small but acknowledged class of cases in which the statutory context dictates that the word “may” in fact means “must”.103 The Minister’s power under s 9(1)(c) is more accurately characterised as evaluative rather than discretionary: he or she is the ultimate arbiter of what the public interest requires in any particular case. Drawing all these considerations together, the point at which we have arrived is that the Department’s new approach to the meaning of public interest has not disrupted the high threshold inherent in 9(1)(c). The opening created by the Roland Kun case is a chink rather than a chasm. Nevertheless, it a chink through which some other deserving applicants may be able to prise their way. Let us remind ourselves again of what has changed. Applicants for citizenship under s 9(1)(c) are no longer required to engage in the Sisyphean task of establishing that their exceptional circumstances give rise to some kind of material benefit or advantage to the New Zealand community. Rather, if a grant of citizenship will assist in resolving an applicant’s exceptional humanitarian circumstances, then it is open to the Minster to make such a grant, in the same way that it is open to the Minister to grant citizenship to a budding Olympian or to a billionaire venture capitalist. In each case, it will be for the Minister to evaluate the strength of the public interest arising from the exceptional circumstances, to weigh that in the balance with any other considerations relevant to the public interest, and to decide where the community’s interests ultimately reside.104 Although it would be unwise to try to predict the circumstances in which such a public interest might be found to arise, we can assume that these may include cases (like Mr Kun’s) where, for humanitarian reasons, it would be useful for the applicant to have access to a New Zealand travel document, and may also include cases where, for humanitarian reasons, compliance with the travel conditions associated with a residence visa is onerous or, indeed, impossible. Importantly, the Department’s new approach no longer cuts humanitarian cases off at the pass. The chink has been opened and it is for the Minister, as the arbiter of New Zealand’s public interest, to decide who may climb through it. 8. Conclusion The purpose of this article has been to make the learnings of the Roland Kun case accessible to other prospective applicants for New Zealand citizenship and their advisors. The statute book has not been amended, and the New Zealand courts have not spoken. But from the perspective of prospective applicants, the law-as-applied has changed. It is not a big change 102 I do not explore here the question whether Mr Kun could have, in the alternative, been granted a “certificate of identity” – a form of New Zealand travel document available under the Passports Act 1992 to non-citizens. For various reasons, this would have been a far less preferable mechanism for resolving Mr Kun’s situation. It was not, as far as I am aware, considered by the Minister. 103 See Finance Facilities Pty Ltd v Federal Commissioner of Taxation (1971) 127 CLR 106 at 134–135 per Windeyer J; Tyler v Attorney-General [2000] 1 NZLR 211 at [25]. 104 For a more cynical perspective on the capacity of the statutory phrase “public interest” to “channel [political] self-interest through the ideology of legality”, see Alan Rycroft “In the Public Interest” (1989) 106 S African LJ 172 at 183 (albeit writing in the context of apartheid era South Africa). See similarly JAG Griffith The Politics of the Judiciary (3rd ed, Fontana Press, Glasgow, 1985) at 198–199. 21 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3094731