Heads should roll in intelligence shake-up

Public servants responsible for leading New Zealand’s intelligence community ought to have resigned by now, but presumably haven’t found the courage to do so.

Earlier this month the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Mosques on March 15, 2019 presented its final report to the Governor-General. The report makes for distressing reading. It opens with a grisly account of how one man planned, prepared, executed and livestreamed a mass shooting of 100 Muslims.

Another distressing feature of the report is its portrait of our intelligence community’s dysfunction. It describes, for instance, how the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) and Police do not always share information on counterterrorism because staff distrust one another.

This calamitous state of affairs is woeful given the size of annual budget increases enjoyed by our intelligence agencies since the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001. It is also lamentable due to the publicity surrounding Anders Breivik’s mass shooting in 2011, when he targeted minority groups in Norway. It is inexcusable too after members of New Zealand’s Muslim community repeatedly expressed concern over their safety and wellbeing to NZSIS and Police. New Zealand has a history of mass shootings.

Although the royal commission did not make a finding of fault against any public sector agency in respect of New Zealand’s counter-terrorism effort, it did suggest that the dysfunction is “systemic” — as no single agency has overarching responsibility for ensuring New Zealanders’ security from terrorism.

That’s not nearly good enough. The senior public servants employed to lead the NZSIS as a key operational agency and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) as the key co-ordination agency have fallen well short of the high standards New Zealanders are entitled to expect from their intelligence community. Read in its entirety, the commission’s report is a damning, if somewhat veiled, indictment of their performance.

Recognising that New Zealand’s current security arrangements are seriously deficient and cannot continue without remedy, the royal commission recommended a raft of changes, the most significant of which is the establishment of a new intelligence and security agency that will be responsible for strategic intelligence and security leadership functions, including the drafting of a counter-terrorism strategy.

The royal commissioners sought to impose order where order was lacking. While publicly welcoming the report, these public servants must be humiliated by the commission’s recommendations that illustrate their own leadership failings while demonstrating that they are no longer seen as credible security professionals, not least because external reviewers are needed to provide them such detailed advice about their own jobs in such a public manner. Their positions are no longer tenable and will soon cause embarrassment for the Government.

The full implementation of the royal commission’s recommendations will not be credible without an appreciable change in the leadership of New Zealand’s intelligence community. Requiring a senior minister to lead the implementation of the report’s recommendations is, perhaps, the strongest possible vote of no confidence in these public servants.

Given the highly intrusive surveillance powers granted to our intelligence agencies and the secrecy provisions surrounding their activities, New Zealanders deserve to be assured that their intelligence community is well led.. As taxpayers, the New Zealand public will expect these organisational leaders to earn the high salaries that remunerate them for discharging their official duties —and this includes falling on their metaphorical swords when the circumstances require them to do so.

The organisational leaders of the NZSIS and the DPMC must surely value professional integrity and ought to model this value to their employees. In light of the royal commission’s report, it is difficult to see any ethical alternative to their resigning immediately from their respective positions. Yet those resignation letters do not appear forthcoming. As the responsible ministers, Andrew Little and Jacinda Ardern will suffer the indignity of having to ask for those letters if they haven’t already. To do otherwise will undermine the commission’s reputation, inviting yet another public scandal embroiling New Zealand’s intelligence community.

is a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Massey University’s Albany Campus in Auckland.