Public inquiries on counterterrorism: New Zealand’s experience

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of major terrorist attacks, governments create public inquiries to establish the facts of the matter, expose those facts to public scrutiny, find fault, allocate blame, ensure accountability, and restore public confidence. Yet few studies pay close attention to these responses as a practice of remedial intervention into official counterterrorism efforts. Based on our examination of New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019, we argue that two contending approaches to national security shaped the inquiry’s design and informed its conduct. On the one hand, an established whole-of-government approach produced design features that led the inquiry to reproduce the orthodox logic of security professionals and entrench existing security policy and practices. On the other hand, a revisionist approach sought to use the inquiry as a means of furthering the Government’s social cohesion policy agenda and to strengthen democratic protections for minority groups. However, the implementation of the inquiry’s recommendations reveals a deep commitment to the whole-of-government approach to national security, which appears to co-opt civil society representatives and marginalise dissenting voices. This, in our view, leaves New Zealand society little better off when it comes to understanding the nature and scale of the threat posed by terrorism or responding to a diverse array of other security challenges.