HOMELAND SECURITY
Hits and misses in Christchurch Attacks Royal Commission of Inquiry report Massey University intelligence and counter terrorism specialist Dr John Battersby answers our questions on the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terrorist attacks. LoD: The government has accepted all 44 recommendations of the report of this Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attacks of 15 March 2019. What, for you, are the standout recommendations?
Dr John Battersby is a Teaching Fellow in the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at Massey University. He is a specialist on terrorism and counter terrorism.
44
JB: The government accepted the 44 recommendations ‘in principle’ but the finer detail of what the government’s position is remains to be seen. The report and recommendations, given the budget it had, the resources available to it, and the time it took – was large in volume but less incisive than it could have been, with an almost pro forma set of recommendations often seen in these post event assessments. Of the more insightful observations the Royal Commission made was the lack of centralised and coordinated Counter Terrorism system – some of us had already published critiques of the public, bureaucratic and political disinterest in CT, but the Commission can be credited with casting a light on the need for a better level of coordination among government agencies which looks - from the outside at least - as a disconnected set of mutually exclusive half-formed parts. However, the time-honoured recommendation to create yet another bureaucratic body which would add a further set of barriers through which information has to pass, and with which responses need to be coordinated, seldom solves the intelligence-sharing and coordination issues so common in this field.
Firearms regulations and licensing reform is long overdue. The licensing regime has been under-resourced for decades, and successive governments have shown little concern of the risks of an unregistered and growing national recreational arsenal. The Thorp Inquiry report, which followed the Port Arthur mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996, recommended changes which were ignored; a coroner’s report called for reconsideration of the Thorp report after Jan Molenaar killed a police constable and held police off for three days in 2009. It’s no surprise therefore that our firearms regime features among several recommendations in the Royal Commission’s report. Maybe the government will listen and act this time. I applauded the immediate cessation of over the counter sales of Military Style Semi-Automatics, but I was less sure that the buy-back and amnesty was required, or required so quickly. Those who surrendered their firearms had not done anything wrong and surely there was a way for government and gun owners to explore a solution which did not pitch them against each other. Terrorism is the use of violence to influence the political environment inherently connected to a prevailing context– the Royal Commission’s recommendations toward social cohesion (as perfectly reasonable as they may be in themselves) will not socially engineer terrorism out of our society. No amount of policy on social Line of Defence
