From 2004 to 2012 alone, there were about 100 race-related incidents, ranging from murder and kidnapping to serious assault, threatening and disorderly behaviour, abuse, deliberate damage to property and desecration of sacred sites. At the same time, “nearly everyone we met with had personally suffered racist incidents or discrimination”.Įvidence does suggest we have a real problem. The Christchurch royal commission found “most affected whānau, survivors and witnesses” generally viewed New Zealand and New Zealanders positively before the attacks. GettyImages Racism and intolerance hard to measureįinally, and despite initiatives such as the Give Nothing to Racism campaign (launched two years before the Christchurch attack), it is debatable whether racism and intolerance in general have declined at all. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern unveiling a commemorative plaque at Al Noor Mosque in 2020. While the police and NZSIS may have largely escaped blame for the original March 15 attack, their defence of difficulty in identifying an attacker in advance cannot be used twice. Expecting a few obvious keyword searches within known extremist online hotspots is hardly unreasonable. The public knows New Zealand is part of the powerful Five Eyes global intelligence network. This suggests security agencies need to be exceptionally vigilant - more so than they have appeared to be recently.Ĭhristchurch's legacy of fighting violent extremism online must go further – deep into the dark webĬonfronted with the fact that a member of the public, not the police or security agencies, spotted the latest threat on the 4chan website, the NZSIS claimed it cannot monitor “millions of pages of posts made online every day”.
The secrecy around what they do runs deep.īut recent publicly reported incidents suggest a higher-than-desirable level of risk, including:Ī white nationalist serving in the military charged with espionageĪ well-armed teenager who posted inflammatory and extreme views and appears to have planned to attack his schoolĪn arrest in Christchurch following a threat to attack the same mosques targeted in 2019.
While the failures of security agencies are public, their successes are not. How feasible, and how close we have already come to other attacks, is difficult to gauge. That means a terrorist attack is seen as “feasible and could well occur”. But, despite these various initiatives, the terrorism threat level in New Zealand has not decreased, but has moved from “low” to “ medium” since March 15 2019. The royal commission of inquiry into the terror attack heard harrowing testimony from survivors.
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