Jacinda Ardern and Andrew Little (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Jacinda Ardern and Andrew Little (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

SocietyDecember 8, 2020

Ardern apologises as Royal Commission on March 15 attacks calls for spy agency overhaul

Contributing writer
Jacinda Ardern and Andrew Little (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Jacinda Ardern and Andrew Little (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

The Royal Commission into the Christchurch attack has made 44 recommendations, including a sweeping overhaul and expansion of New Zealand’s national security state. Justin Giovannetti reports from parliament.

New Zealand’s security services knew almost nothing about the the terrorist’s intentions before the Christchurch attack and could have done very little to stop him, the long-awaited Royal Commission of Inquiry has concluded.

The prime minister, police commissioner and director-general of the Security Intelligence Service apologised this morning at parliament for the failings highlighted in the report. The immediate failings for the 2019 attack in Christchurch were few, but the need for changes going forward is great, the inquiry found.

Nearly one-third of the 44 recommendations from the inquiry’s massive report call for New Zealand to expand its national security state, with a new intelligence agency, more funding, more spies, more analysts and more powers.

Balancing the enlarged security state is a call for more to be done to encourage diversity. The inquiry recommends a new ministry of ethnic communities, to focus on increasing the country’s social cohesion. That would be accompanied by a series of legislated changed to hate-crimes, more police training around firearms licensing and a way for the public to tell security agencies about things that concern them.

The report’s authors said that one thought that kept returning to them as they wrote the document was the need for New Zealand “to confront and engage openly with hard issues”. The inquiry said there has been limited public or political appetite in recent years to discussing firearms licensing, counterterrorism, social cohesion and diversity.

The Royal Commission report (Photo: NEIL SANDS/AFP via Getty Images)

Speaking with reporters just before the report’s public release, prime minister Jacinda Ardern said that her government has decided to adopt all 44 of the inquiry’s recommendations.

“On behalf of the government, I apologise,” said Ardern, speaking at the banquet hall in the Beehive. “An apology would be hollow without action,” she added.

The prime minister highlighted the two failings in the inquiry: that the firearms licensing regime provided the terrorist with weapons, as well as the failure of the security and intelligence agencies to focus on far-right extremism. The inquiry found an “inappropriate concentration of resources” on Islamic extremism to the detriment of other investigations. However in both cases, the inquiry found that fixing those failings would not have stopped the attack.

Ardern said that all the recommendations are “a significant work programme to make New Zealand safer, and I hope, a more cohesive country”.

Cabinet has put Andrew Little in charge of implementing the report. Little, a past minister of justice, is currently the minister responsible for the country’s intelligence agencies. She said he has the experience to see through the changes.

While some recommendations will be acted on quickly, including the new ethnic communities ministry and legal changes to hate laws, others will take time.

Before she spoke with reporters, Ardern’s office and other senior ministers provided reporters with a series of press release responding to the inquiry report. They made nearly no reference to the significant overhaul of the national security apparatus called for by the inquiry. The prime minister said in response to questions from reporters about the omission that she accepted the recommendations. She said the new intelligence agency will need significant consultation before it can be announced.

The review only mention’s the terrorist’s name once, in the executive summary. Over the course of over 800 pages, split between seven booklets, it isn’t mentioned again.

Ardern said she will raise with the Australian prime minister the report’s findings that security services across the ditch had also collected little information on the man. They might want to look at the report’s findings, she said.

American social media giants will also be getting a call from the prime minister. According to the terrorist’s testimony in the report, he said that YouTube was a more significant source of information and inspiration for him than far right sites. Ardern said she’ll bring that up with the leadership at YouTube.

New Zealand police commissioner Andrew Coster reflected that the only information that should have warned government of the looming attack, according to the inquiry, was an email sent by the terrorist to parliament only eight minutes before he struck. The review found that parliamentary staff did the right thing that day, when they read the email and promptly forwarded it to police. However, that attack was already underway at that point.

Coster said that more training, resources, and a new approvals process in police for firearms licensing was already underway and has improved a situation that needed change. Police were aware of gaps in semi-automatic firearms before the attack and were working on it, he said. But it was too little, too late.

“Families and victims will have a number of unanswered questions” in terms of the police response to the attack, he said. The police will release their review of the attack tomorrow.

One of the report’s conclusions is that the country’s security services are not the all-powerful agencies some people think they are. Instead, it described New Zealand’s intelligence and security services as “fragile” with limited capability and little social licence.

The director-general of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service apologised for her agency’s failure to make people in the Muslim community feel comfortable. “I know that some people with whom NZSIS has engaged felt that they were under suspicion or were of security concern when that was not so,” Rebecca Kitteridge said. The muslim community is not being monitored, she added.

A declassified internal SIS review of the attack was also released by the government, along with the inquiry’s report. After what it described as the most forensic search of the security service’s records in history, informed by post-attack national and international investigations, that review concluded that all it had on the terrorist were his movements into and out of New Zealand.

The most important question, according to the security service, was what should it have known about the man. The SIS review found that the terrorist “took deliberate and effective steps to conceal his plans and such weak signals would have been difficult for any security service to detect”.

According to the spy agency, the only possible way SIS could have discovered the terrorist’s plans in advance was if it had gained a warrant and hacked his computer and emails to acquire a copy of his manifesto. However, in the review, SIS found that it would not have met the threshold for a warrant even if it had received a lead in the case and known what to look for.

Many of the issues raised in the Royal Commission’s inquiry were years or decades in the making, according to Ardern, spanning a number of different governments. “The time has come for us now to fix it,” she said.

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    Photo: Inez
    Photo: Inez

    SocietyDecember 8, 2020

    How do you save a child from falling off the edge of the world?

    Contributing writer
    Photo: Inez
    Photo: Inez

    The final in this season of Frame documentaries introduces 11-year-old Inez. Her story is one that will resonate with a lot of families, writes mum Sonia Gray.

    Inez is part of Frame, a series of short documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff.

    This film is about my daughter Inez. She’s 11 years old and is a funny, kind, smart, quirky kid. But life for her has been very difficult, in a way that will resonate with many.

    As a baby, at least compared to her twin sister Thandie, Nezzie cried – a lot. She was a loud and demanding toddler, but not in a way that suggested anything was wrong. Then when she was six, everything changed. Nezzie’s world started closing in and she stopped doing the things other kids did. She’d always had a love affair with books – she read more between the ages of five and six than I’ve read in my entire life – but her reading became obsessive. She stopped playing with other kids at school break times. “I don’t need friends, mummy, my books are my friends,” she told me, but I knew she desperately wanted to fit in. She stopped eating anything but three or four foods, and her wardrobe pared down to three dresses, then two dresses, then one. She wore that summer dress every single day, and we washed it every single night. For a whole year.

    Nezzie couldn’t bear to have her hair washed or even brushed, so it slowly began to develop into one big dreadlock. It was almost impossible to get her outside, and then she couldn’t bear the touch or sound of water. She became angry and violent at home, and then later at school as well. She was plummeting in a way that made me feel like if we didn’t catch her, she might just fall off the edge of the world. It was terrifying.

    And so began the fight to save my child, which involved navigating a system with absolutely no road map. I worked my way from the GP – “I think you just have a hungry kid” – to a variety of different paediatricians, OTs, psychologists and a few snake oil salesmen too. Along the way Nezzie was given multiple diagnoses: ADHD, ASD, ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), sensory processing disorder, dyspraxia, dysgraphia, dyslexia, dyscalculia and giftedness. I think there is validity in all of these, but a diagnosis doesn’t mean anything if, at the end of it, you’re still a family living in crisis. Which we were, for five years.

    What I’ve learnt about giftedness, in particular, is that it extends beyond learning. All that information coming in is an assault on the senses. The world for Nezzie, particularly when she’s anxious, is Too Loud, Too Tight, Too Bright, Too Unpredictable. And when it becomes overwhelming, the response is fight or flight. In Nezzie’s case, it was usually both.

    Our worst day came when Nez was eight years old and ran away from school. She was missing. The police helicopter went up and waterway searches began and I remember thinking “if we find her, at least we’ll get help now, at least they’ll believe me”. Eventually she was found, but the most I was offered was a suggestion from the police officer that I have a chip implanted in her arm so it would be easier to find her next time it happened. “This sort of thing happens all the time,” he said.

    You may be reading this and thinking, “I wonder if she tried omega-3s”. (For the record: I did, but this is an infinitely bigger problem than any omega-3 can fix.) Or maybe you’re thinking about “setting boundaries” or “time-out” or “schedules”. I understand that unless you’re living it, something like this is so hard to comprehend. But we need to at least try to understand and find empathy, because eventually all of us are affected – the ripples spread wide and they’ll find you too. Kids like mine, who present as “bad kids”, are often left unsupported and untreated. They end up pulling a middle finger to the world. And they become the ones who end up filling our prisons, our hospitals and our suicide statistics.

    There are many capable, beautiful, committed professionals out there who are making a difference, but it took us a long, long time to find them. People who will listen and believe you and don’t resort to “what’s happening at home?” when their strategies fail to work. People who really wanted to understand Nezzie, and could see her behaviour as a symptom rather than a punishable offence. That’s what has made the difference.

    Thankfully, this year things have shifted remarkably and in a very positive way. Nezzie has friends, really good friends who she loves and who love her back. She loves school and loves her teacher. She’s laughing again, and as a mother I feel like I can breathe again. But to get to this point it’s taken not just a handful of people, not even a team, it’s taken a squad. From school staff to the specialists to family, friends and colleagues, it’s taken lots of people working really hard in different ways to bring Nezzie back to that fork in the road. And then to hold her hand as she learns how to walk the other path – the one most of us take for granted.

    I’ve met many families who are in crisis like we were, and the more I meet, the more I’m driven by this whakaaro: what can we do to lift the veil, to blow away the cobwebs? How can we help parents come out of the closet and get the help they need for their child? How can I be as honest as possible without compromising my own kid, and make the road easier for all those riding with me and those who’ll come after? I guess it starts here.

    Most kids like Nezzie suffer in silence, and that creates problems further down the track. Many of them have been excluded from school, and they don’t get invited on playdates or to birthday parties because it always seems to end badly. Even just going to the mall or to the park can turn into a nightmare. Their parents have lost the energy to keep fighting. They’re tired of having their crisis situation flattened and oversimplified and chucked in the too-hard basket. And you don’t see them because families like these slowly shrink their lives down to fit the shitty new reality they’ve been dropped into.

    So my plea to you is this: accept that you might not understand, but open your heart anyway. Make it elastic enough to fit those children who can’t play by our society’s rules. And then get to know them and their families and encourage your kids to do the same. We’ve thrown thousands of dollars at trying to find help, but the biggest gains have come when people reach out to Nezzie, especially other kids – when she feels connected, part of the tribe. That often means crossing over to her side of the bridge, but it’s pretty damn cool over there, I promise you.

    Frame is a series of short, standalone documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff. Watch more here.

    Made with support from NZ On Air.

    Society