After the Christchurch shootings, New Zealand promised change. But Muslims there still don’t feel safe

In the days and weeks after a right-wing terrorist live-streamed the massacre of 51 people at two Christchurch mosques, New Zealand’s leaders promised the country would change. Within 24 hours of the shooting, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that gun laws would change. Within days, Ardern put on a hijab for an emotional meeting with members of the Muslim community.

Within four weeks, the gun reforms passed through Parliament almost unanimously. And within two months, Ardern launched a global campaign to stop terrorism spreading on social media. That swift action won praise from experts and the Muslim community, as New Zealand reeled from the massacre. Brenton Tarrant, the Australian citizen who carried out the attack, appeared in court for the start of sentencing proceedings that are expected to last at least four days.

Tarrant has been convicted of 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder, and 1 charge of being engaged in a terrorist attack. Tarrant is the first person in New Zealand to be convicted of a terrorist attack and is expected to receive a sentence of life in prison, and one of the heaviest non-parole periods in New Zealand’s history. At the hearing, the court heard that Tarrant had begun planning for the attack in 2017, and that he had intended to kill as many people as he could.

Tarrant also planned to burn the mosques to the ground, and was on his way to a third site in Ashburton when police arrested him.

Victims shared personal testimonies in court, some breaking down in tears, and others directly addressing Tarrant. Tarrant appeared to show little emotion as the victims read out their stories. Many of the Christchurch victims were migrants or refugees, and dozens of survivors and support people received special permission to travel to New Zealand for the hearing, where some are expected to give statements on how the shooting impacted their lives.

All that may bring some closure to the victims and their families. But an official inquiry into the attacks remains undelivered 18 months later, and some say the underlying Islamophobia that the government was warned about before the massacre has not been addressed. Although Muslims have been in New Zealand for more than 150 years, the community of mostly migrants only numbers about 60,000 people, or about 1.3% of the country’s population.

Before the Christchurch attacks, Paul Spoonley, a Massey University sociologist, said many New Zealanders would not have been aware of their presence. But some people certainly were. According to Muslims in New Zealand, racism has long been a reality for them even if the country’s majority White population was not aware of it. For five years before the shooting, the non-governmental body Islamic Women’s Council New Zealand (IWCNZ) held a series of meetings and regularly communicated with multiple government agencies about physical and verbal abuse toward Muslims, particularly against women who wear hijabs.

IWCNZ became gravely concerned with the level of Islamaphobia and alt-right activity in New Zealand, according to the council’s submission to an ongoing Royal Commission of Inquiry into what the government knew about Islamophobia before March 2019, and what it could have done to prevent the attacks.

IWCNZ estimates there would not be a Muslim woman in New Zealand who wears the head scarf who has not been abused in public at some time. To complicate matters, there was no comprehensive data collection of hate crimes in New Zealand, unlike other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. When Tarrant opened fire on two mosques, New Zealand security forces were largely focused on the potential of violent terrorism by Muslim extremists, despite multiple attacks by white supremacists overseas.

Minister for New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS), Andrew Little, said the agency had focused on all forms of extremism. However, a 2017 internal briefing document to Little that has been released publicly only mentions Islamic extremists, and makes no mention of the growing far-right threat. While little might have been able to be done when the gunman opened fire, there was a multiplicity of actions that could and should have happened, but were not taken, in the years prior to the attacks.

Had they been taken, Tarrant is likely not to have got to the door of the mosques. After the submission was made public, New Zealand’s Human Rights Commission urged the government to listen to the Muslim community to rectify its failure to act in the past. The New Zealand police, the NZSIS, and the Public Service Commission all said it was inappropriate to comment on the ongoing inquiry which was delayed due to covid.

The New Zealand police remained vigilant to extremist rhetoric, and the NZSIS had already made changes to how it operates since the attacks without specifying what those changes were.

The NZSIS looks forward to receiving the Royal Commission’s findings to give the agency further insights on how it can improve. On March 15th 2019, anyone with a gun license could obtain a military-style, semi-automatic weapon. That meant Tarrant had been able to obtain the guns used in the attack legally, although Ardern said the weapons had been modified to hold more bullets.

Since the 1990s, there had been moves in New Zealand to tighten the laws, but there had been limited impetus to carry through the changes before 2019. The laxity of New Zealand’s gun laws was not widely known, and the country also had a relatively low murder rate, with an average of 74 homicides a year between 2007 and 2017, and only about 11% involving the use of a firearm. If Tarrant had not been able to get a semi-automatic weapon, the death toll of the Christchurch attack would have been far lower.

A semi-automatic gun automatically reloads bullets to allow a shooter to quickly fire again, while a manual gun requires the user to reload the bullets themselves. Within 26 days of the attack, Parliament passed a law banning military-style semi-automatic weapons and introducing a buy-back scheme for weapons that fell afoul of the new rules. Within six months of launching the scheme, they collected about 56,000 guns.

The gun changes were symbolically and practically important.

New Zealand only passed a law introducing a gun register, so it is difficult to know whether all of the semi-automatic weapons have been collected. But the new rules make it much more difficult for potential extremists to obtain semi-automatic guns, they would need to acquire it illegally. The gun restrictions had a big impact in giving the Muslim community a sense of security.

It is certainly making it harder for someone to kill multiple people quickly and easily. On the day of the massacre, about 300,000 copies of a live-streamed video of the attack were published on Facebook before they were removed. In filming his rampage and posting it online, Tarrant grasped intuitively that digital technology could and would amplify his murderous message, ensuring its projection far beyond the cloistered confines of the 8chan sub-thread on which it originated.

After the attacks, Ardern paired with French President Emmanuel Macron to launch the Christchurch Call, a global action plan to prevent online platforms from being used as a tool for terrorists. Facebook, one of the supporters of the Christchurch Call, announced that it would temporarily ban people who had broken its most serious policies from live streaming. But those efforts have had mixed success.

Donald Trump’s administration refused to join the Christchurch Call, citing concerns about freedom of expression, and non-Western tech companies were not part of the initiative.

New Zealand still has not passed legislative changes to back the Christchurch Call, including more comprehensive laws criminalizing hate speech. There are limits to what individual countries can do on international platforms, there was still more to achieve. Facebook’s changes make it harder for an attack to be live-streamed in the future, but such an attack could still be streamed on another platform.

Seven months after Christchurch, an anti-Semitic gunman killed two people in the German town of Halle and streamed it live on online video streaming platform Twitch. And as more platforms introduce restrictions, extremist content is being pushed onto encrypted platforms such as 8chan, where it may be harder for authorities to track. After the attack, many New Zealanders were horrified that such extremism happened in their otherwise relatively progressive country.

In many ways, it was a reckoning, a chance for the Muslim community to finally talk about the racism they had experienced for years. The way that Ardern expressed kindness and compassion struck a chord with New Zealanders, and the event helped bring racism more into the public eye. Racism was hidden in the closet. New Zealand is not paradise, there are still ignorant people who hold extreme views.

But no one expected a white supremacist to do such a thing in New Zealand.

After the attacks, restaurants gave the Muslim community free food, taxi drivers provided free rides, and the public sent messages, cards, and flowers to the mosque. Ardern and the local hospitals also provided support. The support never stopped. New Zealand before the Christchurch attacks is different to New Zealand after the Christchurch attacks. The terrorist wanted to divide New Zealand community, but instead the country is back, together, and standing for peace.

Since the Christchurch attacks, Gamal Fouda, the imam of Al Noor Mosque which was one of the mosques targeted in the attack, and other Muslim leaders have been working closely with police and security forces to allow them to easily report any racist activity. There are still shortcomings, but the New Zealand government is trying its best to make sure that the Muslim community is safe. There has been a shift in New Zealanders’ awareness of the Muslim community.

Most people would not have understood either that New Zealand had an important Muslim community in its midst, or that the country had extremist terrorists who were prepared to articulate and to attack on the basis of extremist views. New Zealand’s population has been very inclusive in their approach since the attacks. There is a warmth amongst people, a recognition that Muslims are just like everyone else, because it was not there before.

But that does not mean the Muslim community feels safe, or that the changes have been adequate.

Spoonley estimates there are still about a dozen extremist groups active in New Zealand, based on his monitoring of extremists online. And economic problems caused by covid could generate more anxiety, leading more people toward far-right thought. There is a tendency to dismiss the Christchurch attack as a one-off event. There are major gaps in terms of how the public service operates.

It was important that people in power reiterated the message of being kind to other another, as Ardern has done. Agencies appear to be waiting for the final report from the Royal Commission, which has been delayed, before they push through any more changes. Ultimately, the Muslim community wants to see New Zealand take the threat of extremism against Muslims as seriously as it has taken the threat of covid.

Authorities still do not have systems in place to identify potential risks, and are not working together enough to share information that could highlight potential problems. Hate is a virus, it needs to be treated in the same way that the government is tackling Covid. Aggressively and with a very strong approach to make sure that it does not spread and wreak havoc and death.

It is important for all communities to work together to prevent anything like the Christchurch attacks happening again in New Zealand and elsewhere.

Ardern delayed the country’s parliamentary election by four weeks to October 17th 2020 after the reemergence of covid. Cases of covid had been confirmed in the New Zealand’s biggest city, Auckland, prompting the government to introduce strict level three lockdown measures on August 12th 2020. The rest of the country was put into level two lockdown, with both lockdown periods extended until at least August 26 as further cases of covid were confirmed.

The general election was due to take place on September 19th 2020, with Parliament rising on August 6th 2020 and campaigning had already begun before the lockdowns were introduced. It was clear the reemergence of covid in Auckland at the beginning of the formal campaign period had been cause for concern. New Zealand’s Electoral Commission assured a safe and accessible election would be possible on the new date.

Ultimately Ardern wanted to ensure New Zealand had a well-run election that gave all voters the best chance to receive all the information about parties and candidates and delivered certainty for the future. While the decision to change the election date rested solely with Ardern as Prime Minister, she consulted with other party leaders as moving an election date especially this late in an electoral cycle was a significant decision. In the end what mattered most was what was in the best interests of voters and New Zealand’s democracy.

Any decision to review the election date was to be as free from partisan political interests as possible.

New Zealand’s Electoral Commission had been preparing for a range of circumstances, such as holding an election in level two or three lockdown, and that Ardern did not intend to change the election date again. Covid was the world’s new normal. New Zealand was working as hard as it could to make sure that its new normal disrupted its people’s lives as little as possible.

Confirmation of the date provided certainty to the public about when the election would be held. New Zealand prepared for the election to be run as if under Alert Level 2 lockdown restrictions, with planned measures including contact tracing, provision of hand sanitizer, and physical distancing. Leader of the opposition, National Party Leader Judith Collins, had previously called for the election to be delayed.

New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters had also called publicly for the election to be delayed and issued a statement welcoming the move. Holding an election during a covid outbreak had the risk of serious interference in New Zealand’s democracy. New Zealand had already spent five weeks under one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, which closed most businesses and schools from March 25th 2020, and saw people stay at home.

New Zealand returned to level one on June 9th 2020, with border controls remaining in place but most citizens living life as normal.

New Zealand had 58 confirmed cases believed to be related to the most recent community cluster and an additional 20 active cases linked to overseas travel, with returning residents still facing a mandatory 14-day quarantine on arrival in the country. Record levels of testing were taking place, with nearly 100,000 of New Zealand’s 597,956 covid tests completed in a week or so. Given the extent of testing that had happened, the number was encouraging.

The origin of the outbreak remained a mystery. Somehow the virus had come in across the border. The questions were where and how. New Zealand had reported a total of 1,280 confirmed and 351 probable covid cases and 22 deaths.