Introduction

This paper seeks to explore how ‘terrorism’ has been perceived in New Zealand from the beginning of terrorism’s modern era in 1968 leading to the present day.  For much of this period terrorism was presumed to occur elsewhere and always perceived as unlikely in New Zealand. This paper traverses the 1970s, considers the impact of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985 and the controversy that surrounded the Operation Eight investigation in 2007. None of these periods prompted an examination of the nature of local terrorism, nor did they make much impact on the prevailing perception that there was no terrorism in New Zealand. Well publicised international developments in terrorism occurred apace in the early 21^st century, which New Zealand watched from a distance, perceiving it as a problem a world away, and not one that needed serious consideration at home. The 15 March 2019 attacks shattered this illusion, though not for the first time, and left New Zealand having to confront the issue it had long ignored. The complexity of the post-COVID19 lockdown period brings with it challenges in determining the potential varying impacts of post-truth belief and expression, and what, if any, connection there is with violent extremism and terrorism now or likely to be in the future. In navigating its future response to terrorism, New Zealand would do well to embrace the omissions of its past.

New Zealanders in the twentieth century by and large perceived terrorism as a foreign phenomenon, which did not occur domestically.  The country was far away from the rest of the world. Its political system was seen as stable and unlikely to prompt violent contention, despite politically charged unrest during the Depression years and the 1951 waterfront strike. These periods did evoke violence and even the occasional bombing, but they were rare, usually isolated, not fatal and easily forgotten. The bombing of a railway bridge during a 1951 mining strike was labelled ‘terrorism’ by Prime Minister Sidney Holland; the label did not stick, nor prompt any subsequent similar activity.¹ The incident was more commonly regarded as an extension of the strike or protest, by one or a few fringe individuals who failed to inspire anyone to emulate them.

In 1965, New Zealand committed combat troops to the Vietnam War.  This prompted little public concern from New Zealanders initially. However, well documented protest subsequently emerged, as well as much less documented deliberate bombings. In 1970 alone there were at least a dozen politically motivated bombings or attempted bombings in New Zealand.  All were prompted by anti-Vietnam war sentiment to some degree, but other political motives were evident.² At a number of bomb scenes notes were left or sent to the media claiming responsibility, detailing clear dissatisfaction with the political status quo or government policy and a determination to continue violence until policy changed.³

On 13 January 1970, a bomb exploded at the Intercontinental Hotel in Auckland, where a few days later visiting US Vice President Spiro Agnew was scheduled to meet New Zealand Government Ministers.⁴ A police investigation was already underway following the discovery of an undetonated bomb at an ammunition store at the New Zealand Army base at Ardmore ten days earlier. A letter had been sent to the New Zealand Herald by the ‘Revolutionary Activists’ claiming responsibility for the attempted bombing, demanding New Zealand withdraw from ANZUS and SEATO, “the establishment of a people’s militia and transfer of industries to workers”.⁵

Despite the claims of responsibility, intimated motivations, clear successful and unsuccessful attempts at violence, which continued throughout 1970 and following years – these ‘revolutionary activists’ were not called terrorists, nor their violence – ‘terrorism’.  Defending three men charged with arson offences stemming from bombings or attempted bombings in September 1970, defence counsel depicted them as “not saboteurs, but protesters”. The sentencing Judge only in part disagreed:

In his Honour’s opinion it was not a political protest. The offences were based on truculence, defiance of authority, and unwillingness to accept the discipline of an ordered society. Anyone had a right to speak and think as he wished, so long as he did not harm others. They also had a right to protest, but this protest must be within the law.⁶  

Neither Judge nor defence counsel appeared to perceive the term ‘terrorism’ as remotely applicable – nor did media reporting of this and other bombing incidents, police investigations or court proceedings, suggest it.  Any risk to public safety as the result of bombings, or challenge to the state’s monopoly on the use of force, or attempts to force changes in policy by violence, seem to have been entirely subsumed by the much greater afront to public decency.  

In 1971, activist Tim Shadbolt explained the actions of his contemporaries as an evolution of protest in the face of peaceful tactics that had been ineffective. “The Vietnam War went on despite all the marches down Queen Street and Lambton Quay, and the majority of [university] students were still apathetic.”⁷  Shadbolt referred to those responsible for 13 bombings that he recorded as occurring in a space of 12 months as ‘The Bombers’ motivated by their objections to New Zealand’s involvement in Vietnam. While he argued ‘The Bombers’ were not members of communist or socialist groups, being motivated solely by their objections to Vietnam – he nevertheless noted the firebombing of one group by another “as a result of an ideological split between radical groups.”⁸ Despite claiming he was opposed to the bombing, he justified it:

No, I don’t agree with bombing. But if I did I’d bomb and bomb hard. Bomb every troop train, every munitions cargo and every supply boat that left for Vietnam.

I believe that what you have to do is blow people’s minds. This is a political war more than a military one.⁹

The notion that any of this could be seen describing or supporting ‘terrorism’ did not enter Shadbolt’s mind. Nor, it would seem, did it occur to anyone else. Despite Shadbolt’s claims, among this milieu was a spectrum of radical expression; there were those sympathising with communism and anarchism, there was a clear challenge to authority and opposition to Western foreign policies. Protests involved ‘scuffles’ with police. If there was ‘extremism’ and irrational ‘conspiracy’ thinking, there was no social media to capture and amplify it.  A study considering how this earlier protest, dissent and anti-authority expression compares to contemporary experience could prove insightful, if it were possible.

New Zealand took no steps toward legislating against ‘terrorism’ or empowering agencies to counter terrorism in the 1970s. Tentative steps were taken, beginning a theme in New Zealand of tiny pockets of practitioners more aware than most of the possibility that terrorism could occur, but with no influence over broader perceptions. NZ Police had developed a small headquarters-based terrorist intelligence capability by mid-1975 – the Police Terrorist Intelligence Unit, but the precise dates of its establishment and subsequent disbandment are not recorded in police records.¹⁰  Anti-Terrorist Squads (ATS) within the existing Armed Offenders Squads were also formed a few years later.¹¹ Terrorism was added to the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Act in 1977.¹² All of these developments were reactions to an upsurge in international terrorism, rather than any broader awareness of terrorism risk in New Zealand.

In 1975, New Zealand experienced its first international terrorism plot.  It developed rapidly and was detected entirely by accident.¹³ In October 1975, three men of the Ananda Marga (AM) sect were arrested after breaking into a quarry at Horokiwi, and admitted their intent was to obtain explosives to blow up the Indian High Commission in Wellington to draw attention to the imprisonment of the sect’s leader in India. Police discourse internally, and externally with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies noted that “Ananda Marga in India is known as a criminal terrorist organisation,” but did not otherwise refer to this incident in New Zealand as ‘terrorism’ or a precursor to it.¹⁴  There was little media coverage of the incident. With no terrorism legislation existing, the AM offenders were charged and convicted for burglary and conspiracy to commit arson. The incident then largely faded from public memory. The public were unaware of warning calls made from New Zealand the day before an Ananda Marga bomb exploded at the Sydney Hilton Hotel on 13 February 1978, killing three people.¹⁵

In the meantime, the Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand between July and September 1981 prompted levels of protest comparable to a decade previously, along with a number of actual, attempted and threatened bombings. Thereafter, an individual fired a shot at the Queen in Dunedin in October 1981; an anarchist killed himself while bombing the NZ Police Computer Centre in Wanganui in 1982, and the Wellington Trade’s Hall was bombed in 1984 killing one person. These later incidents were ‘lone actor’ events (discovered only after they occurred) and were not linked to any broader movement.¹⁶

In 1985, the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) undertook a covert operation against Greenpeace, sinking their flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in July 1985 by setting explosive  charges  against its hull. Suddenly ‘terrorism’ flashed up bright and clear as the label for French actions across the entire spectrum of government, academic and public domains. The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was commonly labelled as the “first act of international terrorism” in New Zealand, the “end of innocence” and a watershed moment denoting that New Zealand was no longer immune from terrorism.¹⁷ One commentator asserted that New Zealand previously had little need for the term ‘terrorism’ at all until the Rainbow Warrior bombing occurred.¹⁸

Precisely none of this was true.  Over the course of the previous 15 years, New Zealand had experienced multiple incidents of deliberate politically motivated violence, two of which had caused fatalities and several others had come close to doing so. If none of it was perceived as ‘terrorism’, it was because New Zealanders seemed unwilling to recognise it as such. This obduracy persisted even as New Zealand enacted its first and only 20^th Century terrorism legislation in the wake of the Rainbow Warrior incident.  Sheridan Webb in her recent study of New Zealand’s terrorism legislation observed:

Within this fraught context, the International Terrorism (Emergency Powers) Bill 1987 was developed. In the Bill’s third reading, Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer stated … that “there should be no misunderstanding that the Bill is aimed at anything other than internationally motivated terrorism, because it is becoming increasingly evident that that is where the danger from terrorism lies.” The Labour-led government was clearly hesitant to consider the possibility of domestic terrorism due to concern that discourse would encompass domestic protest, especially since the 1981 Springbok Tour protests (which Labour generally supported) were still a recent memory.¹⁹

New Zealand would concede terrorism a risk to be mitigated, but only from the comfort of its long-standing assumption that it was a foreign-borne affliction, and nothing New Zealanders actually did could be regarded as such.

The 9/11 attacks confirmed New Zealand’s prevailing assumption that terrorism was a problem largely manifest on distant shores. New Zealand hastily improvised the Terrorism Suppression Act (TSA) in 2002.  The TSA was not designed to be a serious attempt to counter the risk of terrorism in New Zealand.  The TSA was a show of compliance with UN Security Council resolutions in the aftermath of 9/11 to demonstrate New Zealand was in step with the international community. No need was seen to review the TSA until almost two decades later, due to the assumption that terrorism was unlikely ever to be a problem.²⁰

In October 2007, NZ Police terminated Operation Eight (which had involved multiple successive surveillance warrants issued by the High Court). Seventeen people were arrested following a lengthy investigation into weapons acquisition, ‘quasi-military’ style training, and expressions of intentions to use violence for assassination, race war and violence against police.²¹ Police sought authorisation from the Attorney General (which was quickly devolved to the Solicitor General) to lay charges under the TSA. Despite the fact that a) the High Court had issued successive surveillance warrants over the previous several months, b) the High Court would not issue any more because it believed NZ Police had a sufficiency of evidence to prosecute and, finally, c) in October 2007 the High Court issued a search warrant for almost 50 addresses in Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Manawatu and Wellington regions – the Solicitor General declared in November that the TSA was faulty, its wording unclear and that he could not lay charges under it.²² While almost all subsequent criticism was directed at Police, this dramatic variation in the judiciary’s actions passed virtually unnoticed.

Most of those arrested were thereafter released, and media coverage subsequently took up the view that those affected should never have been arrested in the first place. The predominant narrative was that the police had over-reacted, and what occurred in October 2007 was not counter-terrorism, but racism writ large, where the state had used unreasonable force against Maori people. This simplification was more easily conveyed in the media and more digestible by the bulk of New Zealanders who had never thought deeply about terrorism and preferred to shape what occurred into an easier frame of understanding. Academics – supposedly critics and consciences of society and there to challenge its assumptions – simply did not do so in this case.²³ The complexity of the situation involving a grouping of activists, from various causes, brought together by overlapping (but certainly not common) desires, ethnically diverse and spread across the country was not delved into. The ease with which a group obtained and apparently trained with firearms, Molotov cocktails and improvised explosives seemed not to elicit general concern at the time, nor prompt any attention to implications of some other group or individual doing so in the future. There was also the puzzle of what those under investigation intended to do; and when, or indeed if, they ever would have done anything at all. Was this violent extremism? Or was it a highly successful exercise in activist theatre designed to provoke a reaction easily discredited as heavy-handed? Either way, real or not, there was ample reason to review a fundamental question – ‘What was terrorism in New Zealand?’ Regardless of the cause or ideological motive, what behaviour was acceptable and what was not?

But New Zealand did not confront these questions. A review of the TSA was ordered, but then later cancelled.²⁴ Amid the furore, the Crimes (Repeal of Seditious Offences) Amendment Act was passed, removing sedition as a crime in New Zealand.²⁵ The reason given was that laws relating to sedition were outdated and unduly interfered with the freedom of speech.²⁶ Speech or actions which incited violence against the state – were no longer criminal acts.

As the tumultuous year 2007 came to a close, terrorism was a crime that could not be prosecuted because the Act proscribing it in New Zealand was too confusing for the judiciary to understand, and the crime of sedition no longer existed. Rather than confront the complex issue of terrorism, New Zealanders returned to the comfort of their long-held assumption that real terrorism did not occur in their country. The Police later apologised for the action they took under Operation Eight, thus compounding the idea that the whole affair was a misstep, and no one was any the wiser on the question – what was terrorism in New Zealand?²⁷

Meanwhile, social media was harnessed by ISIS to recruit and activate individual perpetrators, inciting them to perform mass killings across the US and Europe.  The Orlando, San Bernadino, and Nice attacks received significant media coverage in New Zealand. The devastating multi-staged attack by Anders Brevik in Oslo in 2011, demonstrated that the threat of 21^st century terrorism was not ideologically confined to religion. These new millennial attackers were defined by their modes of attack against the communities in which they lived, or lived near to. They used automatic weapons and improvised explosives, not against political figures, but against ordinary people in crowded and largely unpoliced places. They took no hostages, but instead aimed to kill volumes of people, foregoing the traditional ransoms or trading hostages for tangible outcomes. If weapons purposely designed for killing were unable to be accessed, they resorted to everyday items such as knives and vehicles. New Zealanders in general watched these developments, perceiving them as horrific but distant curiosities.  Little need was seen to anticipate the possibility of anything like this occurring locally.

Throughout almost the entirety of the first two decades of the 21^st century, New Zealanders continued to perceive terrorism as a hemisphere away, underscored by the fact that while dreadful attacks occurred elsewhere – including in Australia – they simply could not happen in New Zealand. This perception was also true in reverse, with New Zealand often seen as having nothing to offer in the counter terrorism context. Attending a terrorism conference in Sydney in 2017, the author was asked by a prominent Australian counter terrorism academic – what New Zealand was doing there, “there is no terrorism in New Zealand” he said.²⁸ New Zealanders themselves continued to feed the notion. The following year, at a National Security Conference run by the Centre of Defence and Security Studies, at Massey University, a Muslim speaker presented New Zealand as a role model for the rest of the world, citing its commitment to democracy, human rights and diversity as its key strengths. “In comparison to our Western counterparts, there has been no exodus of young Muslims heading overseas to fight, nor have there been any major acts of terror within our country.”²⁹  The assumption was clear, terrorism was not only a distant phenomenon, but New Zealand did everything so well, it was unlikely to occur locally.

However, in March 2019, New Zealand experienced a brutal attack on two Christchurch mosques, from a completely unknown and undetected well-prepared attacker, who gave no warning and who exploited all New Zealand’s assumptions about itself. Despite the sheer scale of the death toll, there was very little involved in the attack that was without precedent. Mass killings had occurred in New Zealand before, semi-automatic weapons had been used in mass shooting incidents, and calls for the restriction of semi-automatics were of long standing, as was political inertia in terms of heeding them.  Concerns about firearms licensing had been voiced and lone actors had gone undetected before carrying out politically motivated violence on a number of previous occasions.  Yet almost identical illusions to those used for the Rainbow Warrior bombing 34 years earlier headlined the 15 March attacks. New Zealand’s immunity from terrorism was gone, it had experienced its end of innocence and international terrorism had finally emerged in New Zealand.  Probably the most succinct summary came from Guardian journalist Elle Hunt:

It is as my friend from Christchurch messaged me this morning, “inconceivable”. There are many words for this horror, but that is the one I and many others can’t get past. There is no terrorism in New Zealand, I’d have told you before I went to bed on Thursday night – and wondered why on earth you’d asked.³⁰

Without question, terrorism in New Zealand had been less frequent and less severe than in many other countries and 15 March was different because of the scale of the tragedy occurring that day. But terrorism had nevertheless existed in New Zealand for fifty years, happening periodically, prompted by various local and international influences, perpetrated usually by isolated lone actors, or small fringe groupings, without warning and at times inspired by ideas emanating from overseas. The primary reason why New Zealand was caught by surprise in March 2019 was not because terrorism was absent previously, but that New Zealanders had so patently ignored its occurrence, and, despite clear local and international omens in the 21^st century, had remained transfixed by the perception that it would not seriously occur. That Brenton Tarrant had gone undetected should not have surprised New Zealanders, when historically a number of previous individual perpetrators of political violence had not been detected either. The only well-known police interception of an allegedly nefarious group prior to any violent incident occurring had been in 2007. The police ultimately apologised for doing so.

In February 2020, New Zealand belatedly produced a Counter Terrorism and Violent Extremism Strategy; it was short, undeveloped and hastily produced before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch attacks (RCOI) could criticise the non-existence of such a strategy.³¹ It has since been revised, but not extensively. In any event, it has been largely overtaken by a bureaucratic scramble to ‘implement’ the 44 recommendations made by the RCOI, when it reported in December 2020.  However, The RCOI was premised on 15 March 2019 being effectively the start point of terrorism in New Zealand, and it missed the opportunity to review the past 50 years of intermittent political violence and drill down to the basics of how terrorism had manifested itself during the period. Terrorism was framed instead by the RCOI, as singly ideological, recent, racist and Right Wing in its origins. While no agency was found to have information it should have acted on and didn’t, the RCOI nevertheless asserted that too much intelligence resource had been spent on Islamist concerns and not enough on Right Wing Extremism, as if counter terrorism was as simple as allocating a quota.³²On 3 September 2021, ISIS inspired attacker Ahmed Samsudeen stabbed 7 people in an Auckland supermarket.  He had been watched by police and NZSIS since 2016.³³ Was he one of the individuals the RCOI would have suggested too much resource had been allocated to? Moreover, Tarrant by his own admission did not come from Australia because of a deep underlying RWE presence in New Zealand, but because he saw the country as complacent about its own safety and security. His manifesto expressed disappointment in both Right Wing and gun lobby groups in New Zealand.³⁴ The former had been always small, fractious and recent research on ‘Action Zealandia’ – the most well-known of such groups, suggests it remains largely dysfunctional.³⁵  Practitioners continue to warn against an undue focus on the singular ideologies of threat groups or individuals, and have drawn attention to the likelihood of perceived emerging threats being driven by a combination of motivations.³⁶ Despite this, broader public expectations continue to presume RWE as the primary and most serious terrorist concern in New Zealand.³⁷

The COVID19 pandemic which resulted in periodic lockdowns and nation-wide vaccine mandates, has prompted new levels of dissent. This dissent, some with rational bases and some not, has flourished on social media and intersected with tiny but multi-faceted and vocal anti-authority, Christian conservative, conspiracist, sovereign citizen and other groups with a range of vague identities.  In February 2022, many of these groups converged on Parliament grounds in Wellington for a 23-day occupation which culminated in a day of rioting on 2 March.³⁸ Concerns are held about the enduring nature of the motives and online expression of those who hold ‘post-truth’ or conspiratorial beliefs.  Their expression includes inciting violence against the state and its government and individual ministers, including the Prime Minister.³⁹ But since 2007 such expression has not been a criminal act in New Zealand! Here then is the cumulative risk of New Zealand foregoing the crime of sedition and in persistently refusing to acknowledge, discuss or debate historical trends in terrorism. Seeing nothing as relevant prior to 2019, perceiving little or no terrorism to have existed previously, or that relevant analogous events have occurred before, the country is at a standing start on terrorism in the 2020s. Future terrorism will likely be a kaleidoscope of bits and pieces of old modes, grafted onto new motivations, and will almost certainly catch New Zealanders by surprise when it inevitably happens again. But more than that, dissent, protest against authority, strong and impassioned political criticism, radical thinking and extremism have all existed before in New Zealand. Whether there is any relationship between impassioned criticism, dissent and extremism; and between extremism, violent extremism and terrorism in a domestic context, is a question New Zealand has failed to address for half a century. Not for the lack of opportunity has this failure occurred, but because of an unwillingness to confront and fairly debate the questions – what is terrorism in New Zealand? Regardless of motivation, ideology or excuse – what politically inspired behaviour is acceptable and what is not?