Govt Failing To Keep Communities Safe From Extremism – Greens
The Government’s decision not to implement eight of the 44 recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the March 15th attacks is an affront to those affected by this atrocity and communities at risk of hate crimes.
“What has the Government learnt from that day if it’s unwilling to take up key recommendations on how to prevent such terror attacks recurring?” says the Green Party spokesperson for the Government Response to March 15th, Kahurangi Carter.
“Failing to follow through on recommendations about hate speech, restorative justice for survivors and accessible reporting of risks is a serious dereliction of duty in response to the worst terrorist attack in our history.
“The decision not to follow through on the recommendation about hate speech is particularly galling. At a time when we’re seeing more online extremism, disinformation and division, we must remember that terror atrocities often begin with hate speech – and as this terrible instance showed, particularly when it’s allowed to spread online.
“If existing reporting mechanisms for threats were sufficient, March 15th may have been avoided. Our Muslim communities in Aotearoa raised their concern time and time again before that dark day, but it fell on deaf ears. An inability to report hate speech means our institutions can’t monitor that risk – that’s not good enough.
“Another recommendation knocked back is mandatory reporting of firearms injuries to police by health professionals. This only reinforces the ‘head in the sand’ mentality of a Government seeking to liberalise gun laws.
“The world is watching our response to one of the darkest days in our history. Picking and choosing recommendations to end far-right terror fails not just the victims and survivors of this tragedy, but makes Aotearoa less safe for all.
It has been 5 years since we were shaken from our complacency.
Shocked from the belief that such malevolence could burrow into our soul.
Repulsed by the mutation of thought that could justify such cruelty and vile spite.
March 15th, 2019 is etched in our history with pain and untold suffering.
Muslims going about their normal lives in Christchurch were attacked by a white supremacist Australian who had been radicalised online by a hatred against Islam and who had gamed the incompetent Police into gaining domestic terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
I remember seeing the appalling violence appear on my Facebook feed.
I didn’t understand what I was watching.
At first glance I thought it was a video game or a movie trailer until I focused.
I remember recoiling in horror at what I was seeing.
I immediately started searching online and found his manifesto.
It was a mix of mutated madness and unyielding hatred. His fixation on certain White Supremacist symbolic historical conflicts to construct a replacement narrative was evident throughout his manifesto and his clear devotion to being a foot soldier for this movement was verbalised repeatedly.
He knew exactly what he was doing and was arguing for his cause via extreme violence.
To pretend he was not a white supremacist with a very clear philosophy of terrorism to promote his white supremacy neurosis allows this mutation of a human being off the hook.
Tarrant knew exactly what he was doing. We should feel no remorse, no sympathy and no confusion over what he is and what he was trying to do.
He is as close to evil as one gets.
In the 5 years since his disgusting act of violence we have struggled to comprehend what happened.
The Government whitewashed the entire Intelligence apparatus of any responsibility while pretending hate speech laws were a solution.
This is the list of NZ security apparatus, many acronyms you’ve never heard of, who are supposed to keep us safe with mass surveillance powers from this very type of terrorism…
- The SIS (Secret Intelligence Services)
- The GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau)
- The NSG (National Security Group)
- The Police Intelligence Unit
- The CNSN (Cabinet National Security Committee)
- The ODESC (Officials’ Committee for Domestic and External Security Coordination)
- The SIB (Security and Intelligence Board)
- The CTCC (Counter-Terrorism Coordinating Committee)
- The NICC ( National Intelligence Coordination Committee)
- The IAD (Intelligence and Assessments Directorate)
- The NRU (National Risk Unit)
- The NSPD (National Security Policy Directorate)
…they collectively cost us in excess of $100million per year, and when it comes to spying on Muslims, Nicky Hager, Me, Greenpeace, Māori protesting oil drilling, environmentalists and the MANA Party, oh the State breaches our rights all the fucking time without blinking, but a white supremacist terrorist who used white supremacy keywords online, with complaints from the Muslim Community itself and complaints from other gun owners,oh no, apparently our entire Intelligence Apparatus failed and didn’t have any idea whatsoever.
You can see why they’ve slapped a 30year secrecy clause on everything.
These Departments are supposed to be the ones who are asking ‘what if’, they are supposed to be the ones with the imagination to see where the next threat is coming from and they have enormous mass surveillance powers and resourcing to do this.
And yet, nothing.
National’s ‘meh’ response to implementing all the recommendations and awkward shrug really isn’t good enough because the recommendations were the bare minimum.
This tragedy deserved more than virtue signalling.
The most insightful explanation as to what actually happened was quietly released just before Christmas in 2020 when no one was noticing…
Spy partners’ focus dictated lack of Far Right intelligence, GCSB boss says
International priorities dictated a gaping hole in the collection of far-right intelligence reports, according to the lead communications spy agency.
The Royal Commission of inquiry heard that the Government Security Communications Bureau got 7526 intelligence reports about terrorism and violent fanaticism in a three-month period in late 2018-19.
But not a single one was about right-wing extremism.
This “was not the result of the GCSB’s own intelligence collection settings”, the bureau’s Director-General Andrew Hampton told RNZ in a statement.
“The intelligence reporting GCSB receives from its international Signals intelligence partners is what those agencies collect themselves based on their own priorities.”
These partners had their own legal mandates, which might also influence what intelligence they collected, Hampton said.
Let me see if I can get this completely straight.
It’s not the GCSB’s fault, that mass surveillance GCSB who gets hundreds of millions to protect us from threats, it’s not their fault that there was a massive failure in intelligence because our overseas partners only provide us with substandard intelligence that is warped by their own bias and legal blind spots?????
That’s the best they’ve come up with?
Look at how this excuse implodes later in the interview…
However, he added: “GCSB shares our intelligence and security priorities with its partners and, since the 15 March, 2019 attacks, has emphasised to them the importance to New Zealand of countering white identity extremism.”
…r-i-g-h-t.
So if the GCSB had told our partners in the first place that we were concerned about white supremacy they would have provided all they had?
See how that still comes back to the GCSB’s lack of ability to see white supremacy as a threat?
The most dangerous mutations of white supremacy trace their narratives to certain historic events. A basic keyword search of those historic events would have had the terrorist pinging like a warning bell…
In March and August 2018, up to a year before he attacked two Christchurch mosques, gunman Brenton Tarrant posted publicly online that he planned to do so. Until now, these statements have not been identified.
In fact, for four years before his attack, the terrorist had been posting anonymously but publicly on the online message board 4chan about the need to attack people of colour in locations of “significance”, including places of worship.
In its final report in 2020, the royal commission of inquiry into the terror attacks wrote:
The individual claimed that he was not a frequent commenter on extreme right-wing sites and that YouTube was, for him, a far more significant source of information and inspiration. Although he did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube and is therefore consistent with what he told us.
Given the importance of online environments in radicalising lone actor terrorists, we questioned this and set out to investigate whether right-wing websites were important in the terrorist’s radicalisation.
What we found overturns a great deal of what we thought we knew about him. It also raises serious questions, not only about why this posting was not detected before the attack, but also why it has not been discovered in the five years since the March 15 attacks.
…these new insights go alongside warnings made from his shooting club about his behaviour and shooting stance alongside extremist material downloaded near his address.
If the NZ Intelligence Apparatus had made white supremacy a focus, they would have seen him.
None of that has been given enough focus.
The reality is we don’t want to talk about it.
We don’t want to talk about a white supremacist plotting an atrocity.
We don’t want to talk about the ease with which he manipulated lax Police process to buy his sub machine guns.
We don’t want to talk about the garden variety bigotry against Muslim people in this country.
We don’t want to talk about the cascade failure of our Intelligence apparatus is finding him.
We don’t want to talk about any of it.
Pakeha NZ is very brittle and fragile when it comes to death and pain. We are an emotionally uptight ruddy people with little forgiveness.
Māori culture know how to grieve, they’ve suffered so much pain their death rituals are intrinsic to the cosmology.
NZ hasn’t managed to process what happened in Christchurch while the victims continue to suffer from our refusal to process the horror that erupted.
We are a pre-teen juvenile culture desperately trying to understand an adult obscenity.
National’s ‘meh’ proves that.
The Greens should celebrate this, as it would be their activists that would be heading to prison under such laws, probably Muslims too.
crap
Have a look at the prison sentences handed out to protesters overseas. You think you’re making laws to protect your rights & freedoms, when you’re actually creating the cage you will be locked in. The authorities love poorly defined laws and will almost always use them in a way those pushing for them never intended, and almost always against the already marginalized.
Exactly, Rat in a cage.
Possibly but there may be no room as the government should be filling the cells with the atrocities against this country.
Rat in a cage It was Green and Labour politicians, and the MSM itself, who misrepresented the Albert Park ‘Let Women Speak’ event as anti-trans, resulting in women being terrorised and beaten, and that day of shame celebrated as some sort of liberation or joy.
Was it not Marama Davidson who blamed white men for the violence in NZ
.Was this not hate speech .
There is plenty of hate posts on the Right in particular the current leader but some seem to say if it is said by the left it is OK because they are all soft and fluffy .
Trevor No, Marama only blamed cisgender white men for all the violence, gays and transgendered folk apparently being ok. I don’t recall heterosexual white men beating up women in Albert Park, unless those blokes in frocks were really cisgender men masquerading as transgender, and nor were they all white anyway, or even New Zealand born persons. At least two were off-shore imports.
Hate speech ? I doubt that anyone would unleash violence upon white heterosexual males because of Marama Davidson’s spoutings.
The Ukrainians view the mosque shooter as a hero and NZ supports Ukraine in Putin’s war against Ukraine nazis.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-10/christchurch-shooting-far-right-groups-in-ukraine-eastern-europe/10983542
Pass the cool aid.
The CoC vandals are on a TINA like rampage that Roger Douglas and Mad Dog Prebble would be proud of, basically laying waste to anything Labour led Govt.s did.
The security forces were let off the hook and Natzos want it to stay that way, while letting Muslims know exactly where they stand–nowhere.
Is White fragility a thing? How does one recognise this?
Best I go to the doctor.
You could say (and Stephen will no doubt be along shortly to contradict this) that Maori “staunchness and ability to have grief” in the cosmology, as Maori fragility.
Maybe Whites are more staunch and realistic than Maori? You know; lets get on with the future as the past cannot be restored? Only used as a reference to betterment in the future? You only need to look at the restoration and rebuild of Europe after WW2 to see the diametric opposite of white fragility.
To build the narrative that Maori are not as fragile as the rest of us requires the denigration of all other races as being “more fragile”. Not a sound argument position.
what a crock of shit Ive seen more white people go to peices when some one dis than any Maori .The white people go to peices because they feel guilty because while the person was alive they did not give a fuck about them as they were to busy trying to fuck the maori over .When a Maori dies there is a normal ritual where they all come together and cellebrate the life of the person hence why we see massive Tangi at the local Marae compared to the 20 people that turn up to a white persons funeral if they even have one at all .
Then the white fuckers start a war over who should have got what when the person whom they took for granted left them nothing in the will .
This story is nothing to do with Maori is it .There were no Maori murdered were there dick head .Shows how obsessed you are with the bull shit DA MAORI are stealing every mantra of the white supremist parties .
I think the Maori Party leader, Front-bum’s s-i-law, said Maori are genetically superior to non-Maori. Perhaps that’s why the Irish one smirks, but I’m unaware of evidence supporting this claim.
Knee-jerk laws are rarely good laws.
Thank goodness they’re back- tracking on “ hate speech “ – the thin end of the wedge of government censorship and control what it’s citizens see, say, read, and think.
What might be called the “liberal orthodoxy” (e.g. mass immigration policies, promotion of LGBTQI issues, feminism, globalism etc.) is, apparently, so weak and fragile and indeed unpopular, that if people were allowed to speak freely about these issues and their effects, the orthodoxy would be over in about 5 minutes. The basic principle is that there is no need to sensor falsehoods (after all, they’re false, so the truth will win out), only utterances of truth (which are the biggest threat to lies). Under the cover of “banning hate speech,” the lies (most of them becoming self-evident given enough time) are protected. If diversity were actually a strength, it could withstand any amount of criticism. Because it is obviously a weakness (difference being the ultimate wellspring of conflict), its critics and sceptics must be demonised.
Indeed, Annie.
The claim of White replacement is a completely verifiable proposition: are historically White (that is, European-majority) countries becoming less and less White over time purely as a statistical fact? Yes, they are. What is the cause of this decline (you could say “replacement”)? A policy of mass immigration from non-White countries post WW2, but especially the last 20 or 30 years. So, it is a fact that White people are being replaced, whether or not you think it is intentional (which I think it is, given the anti-White animus that has become so prevalent and open in the discourse).
Is the answer mass murder? No, obviously not. But if people were able to freely express their concerns about the inevitable long term effects of the policy (the scale of which is unprecedented in human history) without someone labelling it “hate speech” then perhaps people wouldn’t feel motivated to commit mass murder as a last resort.
The same argument that is trotted out in support of Maori sovereignty (i.e. that the country was invaded by foreigners who displaced and undermined the existing social paradigm, the premise being that this is wrong) is the same argument that White people use to object against mass third world immigration. The only difference seems to be that Maori are seen as having a perfectly valid point, whereas White people are hateful bigots who are expected to shut their mouths.
Nathan. The Green Party’s assertion that the public would feel safer meeting a patched gang member in a dark alley than a police officer, could verge on hate speech, and is a disgraceful comment to be making about police officers whose job is to protect the public and enforce the law.
The problem, as has been previously stated, is that “hate speech” is too ill-defined a concept to be embodied in law, but Parliamentarians trying to turn the electorate against the police without a shred of supporting evidence, verges on treason, to say the last, and is massively socially irresponsible. I hope no children or vulnerable young persons witnessed Carter saying this.
What the fuck ,most of the white sick fucks commenting to day have missed the point that the recommendations were made by a Royal commision .This government of white supremists is now thumbing their nose at that Royal commision .
This is the same fate that the recent abuse in care Royal commision faces under this bunch of wellfare child bashing thugs .
@ Gordon
The point you’re missing is hate speech laws are largely not wanted nor are they required. Regardless who recommends them.
The Greens are showing a lack of wisdom and judgement advocating for them.
Further, the support of hate speech laws is far from being a vote winning stance to take.
https://www.fsu.nz/new_polling_shows_kiwis_value_free_speech_the_poorest_most_of_all_and_they_think_it_s_under_threat
Labour also need to wake up to this.
@ Rat in a cage & Snow White
Absolutely agree.
The Greens are failing to see the wider risks in what they are promoting/advocating.
We don’t need ‘hate speech’ laws. These are never used in a practical manner to address actual problems. Everyone knows who Brenton Tarrant is. He is a zionist who, inspired by the hateful “counterjihad” hoax promoted by characters like Pamela Geller, Rob Berg, Tommy Robinson, and Juliet Moses, enacted a copycat of the zionist terror attack Baruch Goldstein launched against the al-Ibrahami mosque in occupied Palestine in 1994.
After that horrific attack, zionist agents in New Zealand tried to subvert a hui dedicated to responding to the attack they had inspired, to use it to spread their hate further.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/06/new-zealand-anti-terrorism-hui-sees-mass-walkout-over-hezbollah-comment.html
There is no need for hate speech laws to address the problem that these characters pose. They are agents of what can most generously be seen as a ‘foreign power’ (if one chooses to accept the bizarre idea that ‘Israel’ is a real country). Laws against treason exist and can and should be used against them.
Can’t help but think if it was labour we would be congratulating them for actioning an amazing 36 of 44 recommendations. They are of course. Recommendations not commandments.
“36 of 44”
Pity Labour couldn’t achieve that with the Welfare Expert Advisory Group Report.
Less inequality results in more harmony.
Hate is hate is hate. You can dress it up all you like, you can ignore it at your peril, you can glorify it you can pretend it never happens. You can also pretend guns don’t kill . Hate crimes only happen to other people not yourself until it does. Remember we had a kind PM and look at what happened to her and her family all in the name of hate. Oh yes let’s not forget about free speech it’s what David Seymour says it is. Nigel Farage any one for couple of white supremacy riots just to make a point. Live and let live is no longer an option but its ok as long as your white.
You can ignore it at your peril, you can glorify it. You can pretend it never happens. You can also pretend guns don’t kill. Hate speech laws only happen to other people and not yourself until it does.
Remember, we had a kind PM, until she wasn’t.
Look how she divided families and friendships throughout the nation.
And look how voters responded come election time.
Due to their covid response, Labour are somewhat tarred as authoritarian.
Pushing hate speech laws doesn’t do them any favours.
Free speech is pivotal to democracy and the majority don’t want that changed.
Comments are closed.