One Year After March 15 Attacks: what has changed in New Zealand?

It is five days before the first anniversary of the Christchurch Mosque massacre on March 15. Fifty-one people died and 49 were injured in the 2019 shootings. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern referred to it as New Zealand's "darkest day". The attacks have been linked to international networks of Far-Right white supremacist extremists. [As at 17 March 2020, the video of the attacks is still online]

What has changed in this wounded country of ours since then? There have been significant events, and facts discovered about the events of that horrific day; painful recollections and strong protests from some of the victims about lack of support; steps along the road to the prosecution of the alleged shooter and justice for the victims, survivors and their families; and then there have been lingering and difficult questions about New Zealand's not-so-buried vein of racism and white supremacy (with all the accompanying denial, guilt, emotions, identity, culpability, and forgiveness issues), along with ongoing reflection on why these catastrophic and traumatic events happened, and what the aftermath has revealed about New Zealand society.

My article in Stuff on 26 March 2019 was written in shock still at the cataclysmic events. What has changed for me is the pride I feel in the efforts made to support the NZ Muslim Community. It hasn't been perfect - empathy has been lacking at times, efforts to reach out and inform them of what is going on have at times been lacking. Much more practical support could have been offered earlier. However, New Zealand has woken up to its slumbering racism - not in all quarters, however. The piece I originally wrote was expanded by me for the US online journal HSToday (Homeland Security Today). I wrote about the white face of New Zealand since the Second World War, and New Zealand's problems with accepting the influx of immigrants since the 1990's. There has been too much thinly-veiled xenophobia, hostility expressed by discriminatory rental housing practices, for one instance.

This next paragraph is lifted from my article:

A small segue into relatively recent NZ history…..

 There is a large, often semi-rural or rural group of middle-class New Zealanders who remember the 1950’s and 1960’s fondly as a time of suburban complacency and post-WWII affluence. The US dubbed this demographic as the “silent majority”. In 1972 New Zealand was dubbed the “half-gallon, quarter-acre pavlova paradise” by an academic and TV political commentator in New Zealand, the Yorkshireman ex-Labour MP and now Brexiteer Austin Mitchell, in his book of the same name. Forty years later he revisited NZ (and pavlova) in a 2002 documentary to see how NZ had changed (watch out for the “American hot-dog”). Although a charming travelogue, he mainly interviews whites and the issue of Maori/Pakeha relations is only briefly touched upon by historian Michael King who found things to be greatly improved. The role of the small group of white supremacists (neo-Nazis) was not touched on at all.

NZ author and mainstream commentator Gordon McLauchlan, in his iconic 1976 book “The Passionless People - New Zealanders in the 1970’s”, wrote about New Zealand’s foibles. In a 2012 review of his update “Passionless People Revisited”:

“McLauchlan wonders if anything has changed in our society since the first edition of Passionless People. He notes that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening and that polls reflect that New Zealanders are somewhat smug and without a deeply felt concern for their poorer compatriots” [Read: non-white].

Three years ago a high-profile NZ political commentator wrote about Auckland’s housing crisis as follows:

 “The politicians squabble over who's to blame for the state we now find ourselves in. The answer is market forces, and the fact that we've now got migrants flooding into the country at the highest rate in a hundred years, which puts pressure on everything from health to housing…….While they're at it they could look at restricting the sale of existing houses to foreigners.”

News Media Coverage Since the Attacks

The news coverage by a variety of national and international media sources traces the progress we have made as a country since to come to terms with this outrage.

News of the links of the Australian alleged shooter with the international Far-Right stunned New Zealanders unused to international terrorism on their own doorstep. There have been disputed reports of his travels to Austria and Ukraine and contacts with the leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement Martin Sellner and the Aznov Battalion in Ukraine.

The New Zealand news media has provided a balance of challenging and "good news" stories - on how the Muslim communities throughout the country have and have not been supported, the recovering survivors, the heroism of NZ Police, first responders and hospital personnel - and the anger that has arisen over the past year about racism and discrimination. There have been several stories about the outrage of Muslim leaders where a feeling of exclusion from the processes of accountability has been felt, and a lack of transparency identified in processes that deal with the wider impact on New Zealanders as a whole. There has been reportage of the frustrations and resentments of the survivors and their families about how slow support was to arrive, the excuses made from those tasked with such support, the sense of exclusion from the survivors and their families from the Royal Commission of Inquiry, anxiety about the trial itself, and the impending first anniversary of the killings.

There have also been considered articles on white supremacy past and present in Christchurch and dealing with the racism of white New Zealanders.

There has been coverage of the initial reluctance from the Muslim communities to participate in the commemorations of the victims of the first anniversary of the attacks, despite encouragement from a Christchurch imam. In the lead-up to March 15 Christchurch Muslims are telling their own video stories in a collection of interviews about the day that changed everything for them last year.

Journalists have studied the vastly different coverage of New Zealand and Australian media.

"New research by Dr Gavin Ellis and Dr Denis Muller revealed the gulf of differences in editorial decisions by media outlets in the neighbouring countries. Dr Gavin Ellis said the New Zealand media concentrated almost entirely on the victims. However Australian media spotlighted [the shooter], running extended coverage on his so-called manifesto, ideology and violence. "Australian media played into the hands of the people who do these sorts of things, whereas the New Zealand media were very careful, very wise I think, not to give him oxygen from day one," Dr Ellis said. Their findings were published in Kōtuitui: The New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences, published by the Royal Society Te Aparangi.

They found that 34 per cent of stories in the New Zealand media over the first three days after the attack focused on the victims. But in Australia, only 8 per cent of published stories focused on the victims.

International and domestic media has taken a close interest with multiple stories of the international far-right linkages of the Christchurch shooter, and subsequent terrorist attacks in Poway, El Paso and Norway inspired by the Christchurch shooter.

New Zealand’s Far Right

Professor Paul Spoonley of Massey University, New Zealand is the country’s foremost expert on New Zealand’s Far Right. In the immediate wake of the Christchurch attacks he estimated to The Guardian that:-

“there could be between 200 and 250 active members of far-right groups in the country including the New Zealand National Front, the Dominion Movement and Right Wing Resistance. In 2017 members of the National Front – a white nationalist group – clashed with protesters outside parliament in Wellington, while a University of Auckland student group called the European Students Association was accused of promoting material “typical of white supremacist nationalist groups”. More recently the Dominion Movement, a “youth-oriented brotherhood of nationalists” which shares ideological similarities with the European identitarian movement, has been active in the country.”

Despite his following such groups for many years, he wrote “We’ve all been caught out by this.”

At the end of March, two weeks after the attacks, he wrote, “The Far Right is Here”

“The number of far-right groups or individuals is not important. It is their potential to harass and intimidate, and to be violent….The other issue is that many of us are not the target. The actions and beliefs of these groups are invisible or irrelevant to us in our daily lives. But for those who are targeted, their lives and security are often under constant threat. We should listen to their experiences.”

Radio New Zealand conducted an investigation into the Far-Right in New Zealand after the attacks in Christchurch. It found that:-

“The old has been replaced by the new, however. The SS-style uniforms and neo-Nazi regalia are out, dress shirts, jeans and sweaters are in. New breeds and brands of the far-right have emerged in the past decade with a pick and mix of political causes and ideologies: anti-Islam, white supremacy, anti-immigration, and the current populist tag "identitarianism": the belief that social, ethnic and cultural identity matters above all.”

“One local group which espouses this new shade of conservatism is Right Minds, which has been prominent in the campaign against the UN Migration agreement and in support of free speech - particularly for the Canadian far-right activists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux.

Its public face is Dieuwe de Boer, who rejects the "alt-right" label and declined to be interviewed too, saying he would only speaking on alternative-media platforms.

On the Australian-based Unshackled website, he spoke of the dangers of mass migration around the world. 

"It's not about being against immigration in general but about having people who will want to fit in, who will want to integrate and will want to participate in our society without turning it into the society that they left for a reason. 

"So it is a continuing worry or something to keep an eye on." 

The Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand

Anjum Rahman repeatedly drew the attention of NZ Government Ministers to the problems of violence, hate speech and discrimination suffered by Muslims in New Zealand to no avail– before the attacks.

 Vocal after the attacks, the Council now welcomes the appointment of a new Race Relations Commissioner.

The government is now considering law changes around hate speech after a study found it has increased over the past year.

Masjid Al Noor Mosque after the terror attacks, with flowers placed along the top of the fence

Photo: James Dann 

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Facts/Timeline

Some facts and a timeline of significant events since March 15, 2019 when a smirking far-right white supremacist alleged terrorist opened fire with an AR-15 machine gun inside 2 mosques in Christchurch (Al-Noor and Linwood Islamic Centre) and murdered 51 Muslim New Zealanders and wounded 49 at prayer, while he gloated to his extremist followers via Facebook Live. His video of the shootings went viral on Facebook and message boards on the Dark Web before some only of the millions shared were taken down in an excruciatingly slow response by Facebook management [as at 17 March 2020 videos of the attack are still online]:

• 15 March 2009: Australian Brendan Tarrant arrested after he allegedly gunned down and killed 51 Muslim New Zealanders and wounded 49 at 2 mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch in the South Island.
• 16 March 2019: the alleged shooter was charged with 1 count of murder and refused bail pending transfer of the proceedings to the High Court where he was remanded in custody (not having sought bail) and transferred to the maximum security unit at Auckland Prison.
• 16 March 2019: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visits Christchurch mosques wearing a hijab on the morning after the attack; she visited the Deans Ave and Linwood mosques where the shootings took place. 
• 21 March 2019: Jacinda Ardern announces that there will be a ban on all military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles
• 25 March 2019: Royal Commission of Inquiry into the country's security agencies announced.
• 29 March 2019 National Remembrance Service in Christchurch
• 4 April 2019: Police increased the alleged shooter's charges to 51 murders and 40 attempted murders with other charges under consideration; a further charge of engaging in a terrorist act under s6A of the Terrorist Suppression Act 2002 was added on 21 May 2019. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
• 5 April 2019: psychiatric assessment ordered by the court
• 8 April 2019: Prime Minister Ardern confirmed the terms of reference for the Royal Commission of Inquiry, and announced that Supreme Court justice Sir William Young would chair the inquiry.
• 12 April 2019: the change to New Zealand gun laws comes into effect.
• 15 May 2019: Christchurch Call hosted by Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron; a nonbinding Pledge document was signed by a group of world leaders to combat online extremism.
• 14 June 2019: the alleged shooter appeared at the Christchurch High Court via audio-visual link from Auckland Prison. Through his lawyer, he pleaded not guilty to engaging in a terrorist act, 51 counts of murder, and 40 counts of attempted murder. 
• 14 August 2019: the alleged shooter was able to send seven letters from prison, two to his mother and five to unnamed recipients. One of these letters was subsequently posted on the Internet message boards 4chan and 8chan by a recipient. Minister of Corrections Kelvin Davis and the Department of Corrections were criticised for allowing the distribution of these letters.
• 19 August: Prime Minister Ardern announced that the Government would explore amending the Corrections Act 2004 to further restrict what mail can be received and sent by prisoners.
• 12 December 2019: Terrorism Suppression Act (Control Orders) Bill becomes law
• The Royal Commission of Inquiry Findings delayed till end of April 2020; the alleged shooter will be given a draft to read and respond to before its release.
• A national remembrance service announced for the first anniversary of the Christchurch mosque attacks: "Those most affected are putting together the programme for the service in Christchurch's Hagley Park. It will be jointly led by the Muslim community, the Christchurch City Council, the Government, and Ngāi Tūāhuriri."
• Muslim leader calls for proper compensation of victims
• National Memorial Service is cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic
• Videos of the Christchurch attacks are still online as at 17 March 2020: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/03/14/1081726/mosque-attack-video-still-online

Pamela Williamson 2020

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