HOMELAND SECURITY A New Zealand strategy for protecting crowded places from attack
Chief Editor Nicholas Dynon breaks down the soon-to-be released ‘Protecting Our Crowded Places from attack: New Zealand’s Strategy’ It’s a strategy that will rely on unprecedented engagement between Police and businesses and community. New Zealand’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy was published on 18 February, the same day it was green-lighted by Cabinet Decision ERS-19-SUB-0026: Looking Forward: Strengthening New Zealand Against Terrorism and Violent Extremism (September 2019). But most New Zealanders wouldn’t know it. And that’s the way, it appears, the government wants it. For now, at least. Timing is everything. The lack of a fanfare-filled hard launch the likely result of a decision to maintain status quo in the lead-up to the first anniversary of the attacks that prompted the Strategy in the first place. One of the documents mentioned in the Strategy is Protecting Our Crowded Places from attack: New Zealand’s Strategy, which, Line of Defence understands, is likely to be publicly released by the end of March. Just how public that document’s release will be, however, remains for the time being unknown. Benefitting from previous iterations As reported in the Spring 2017 issue of Line of Defence, Australia’s Strateg y for Protecting Crowded Places from Terrorism was launched on 20 August 2017 by the then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Although released by the Australian Attorney General’s Department, it was published under the auspices of the Australia New Zealand Counter Terrorism Committee (ANZCTC). This followed the release three years earlier of the UK Protecting crowded places from terrorism guidance on 14 November 2014, itself preceded over 34
several years by a raft of ‘counter terrorism protective security advice’ documents specific to certain categories of crowded places, including ‘places of worship, major events, health, higher and further education’, ‘stadia and shopping centres’, ‘visitor attractions and bars, public houses and clubs’, and ‘hotels and restaurants & commercial centres’. A straw poll conducted among security sector attendees at the Safe and Secure Facilities and Public Spaces conference hosted by Conferenz in Wellington in August 2019 indicated that the Australian crowded places strategy was to some extent known among New Zealand security practitioners but by no means by a clear majority. By contrast, in Australia the strategy, which provides guidance to owners and operators of crowded places on how to protect their patrons, visitors and employees, has become the vehicle for dynamic platforms of public-private engagement and information sharing both nationally and across states and territories, and also at the local level via Crowded Places forums. A crowded places strategy for New Zealand We are yet to see the document, but it is anticipated that the New Zealand version will share strong commonalities with its Australian predecessor, but with some differences – starting with the title of the document itself.
‘Protecting Our Crowded Places from attack: New Zealand’s Strateg y’ replaces the terrorism-focused nomenclature of the Australian and UK versions with the less-specific ‘attack’. On one level this avoids a potentially undue and alarmist reference to terror, recognising that in New Zealand’s threat profile terrorism looms less large than it does in the UK and across the Tasman. On another level, it also acknowledges that the ‘terrorism’ label – as applied to many attacks internationally – has proven to be somewhat contestable. Many ‘lone wolf’ and ‘fixated person’ attacks, for example, have attracted the terrorism label despite not necessarily meeting the various scholarly or policy definitions of terror. The title of the New Zealand document also departs from the preceding versions by its use of the pronoun ‘Our’, which implies an inclusive identity, and the only nonpreposition within the title not to receive first-letter capitalisation is ‘attack’, semantically subordinating that term. These are subtle yet powerful innovations that convey important New Zealand points of difference: inclusivity and a remit that broadens the utility of the document to the myriad threats – fixated person, armed offender, terrorist or otherwise – that such a Strategy should be able to collectively address. Beyond the front cover, there are several further unique elements. At the Line of Defence
