CHRISTCHURCH 15/3 Christchurch Mosque Attacks: A Tipping Point for New Zealand New Zealand is experienced in responding to crises, write Dr Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor (University of Auckland) and Dr Layla Branicki (Macquarie University), but achieving resilience requires a joined-up approach before crises hit. New Zealanders are collectively shocked and saddened by the events at the mosques in Christchurch last Friday. However, sadly, some of us are also not surprised that a tragic event has eventually reached New Zealand’s shores. The ‘tyranny of distance’ has meant that New Zealand has enjoyed being a long way from most political turmoil which has meant we have enjoyed a relaxed attitude towards political issues and instead successive governments have focused their attention on becoming a resilient nation in the face of natural hazards such as recurring earthquakes and extreme weather events.
However, due to the interconnectivity of technology, New Zealand is no longer isolated from cyber-crime affecting both individuals and organisations. The Christchurch events also demonstrate how domestic extremism can breed onshore (or be imported here) via exposure to extreme ideologies online (seemingly under the radar of authorities) and how livefootage of a real-time extreme event can then be difficult to manage once it has gone viral on a global social media platform. As anyone who has experienced these extreme forms of terrorism involving violence directed at civilians will know, it is deeply upsetting
Dr Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor is Senior Lecturer in business at the University of Auckland. During 20 years in the UK, she worked in the NHS and with the UK Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat.
Dr Layla Branicki is a Lecturer in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University, Sydney. She specialises in individual and organisational resilience and extreme events.
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for everyone involved, whether as individuals, communities or those organisations that are responsible for public health and safety. It undermines individual and collective ontological security, and invokes the reset button. Why? Who? What should happen to avoid further attacks? Hence, after such extreme events such as this there is always a collective call for investigations into how this could have been allowed to happen, and who is to blame? Here in New Zealand this is something that government agencies are bracing themselves for. Our research has found that exposure to recent events influences organisations’ willingness to be prepared to invest in mitigation and resilience to any future events. However, often the nature of the event, such as earthquakes, focuses all activity around preparing for a similar event, rather than a different risk scenario. There is often an element of nimbyism and denial as communities find it difficult to prepare for an event they have never experienced and consider unlikely to happen ‘in their back yard’. From 2008 onwards the UK government realised the need to revise and broaden out the scope of its National Security Strategy every few years to ensure it maintained relevance to the threats faced. This meant that the scope of security-related events broadened out to include counterterrorism, cyber, international military crises and disasters such as floods. Line of Defence
