RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.
Last week, the Royal Commission report into the Christchurch terrorist attacks was finally released. The report made over 40 recommendations, all of which have been accepted by the New Zealand government.

But in Australia, there’s been an unwillingness to grapple with how the shooter was steeped in a culture of far-right extremism. Today, Shakira Hussein on Australia’s responsibility for the Christchurch massacre.

RUBY:

Shakira, can we start with what the royal commission was trying to achieve, why it was set up?

SHAKIRA:
Well, in New Zealand, as in in Australia, Muslim community leaders and Muslim public figures of various types had been warning for years that given the threats that they were receiving, given the type of public discourse that was saturating society in general, it was only a matter of time before a tragedy of this type would take place.

RUBY:

Shakira Hussein is an academic and author. She wrote about the Christchurch attacks for The Saturday Paper.

SHAKIRA:
And given that an event of this nature had been foreseen by people on the ground, why couldn't the relevant authorities have foreseen it as well and therefore done something to prevent it? The intelligence communities who had been surveilling Muslim communities in New Zealand, as in Australia, to the point of harassment, why had they not been undertaking similar levels of surveillance on people who are a threat to the Muslim community rather than people within the Muslim community? And also to discover how the particular individual concerned became radicalised. What was the source of his dystopic and hate-filled worldview

RUBY:

And what did we learn about the shooter's life in the lead up to the attack? Did the report give us any indication of what can drive a person to commit a crime like this?

SHAKIRA:
There's a need to be careful in describing the individual concerned that by looking for sources of his radicalisation, we aren't also humanising him. And providing fodder for his glorification by people who might be susceptible. We need to choose our words carefully.

RUBY:

Mm.

SHAKIRA:
So, he'd led a very banal life growing up in Australian regional town. He’d had various traumas in his childhood. But most people who experienced those types of traumas don't go on to commit mass murder. Teachers and other people in his life had also noticed quite serious racism from him at a very early age. So most of his radicalisation, in fact, it was almost exclusively online, although he claimed to have met various people face to face. But this seems to have been fantasy on his part. And he had connected with various global far right organisations, but also with far right and white nationalist issues from YouTube and videos. During his police interrogation, he disclosed that YouTube was actually a greater source of information and we would say disinformation for him than Facebook.

RUBY:

And so, were there signs, beyond becoming radicalised, that the shooter might be planning something? Were there any missed opportunities - moments where he might have been found out?

SHAKIRA:
There was one moment in time where events might have unfolded differently, and that was after he had to receive hospital treatment because he accidentally shot himself. He wasn't experienced with using guns and he had fragments in his eye and his leg. But the hospital didn't report this event to the police. There was no requirement for them to do so. But I would like to imagine that if a police officer had engaged in conversation at that point, not interrogated, but just chatted about what he was doing with the guns, what he'd been learning, you know, it might have revealed just how many weapons he had for a start. Perhaps, it's very easy to be wise with 20/20 hindsight, but that feels like a missed opportunity.

RUBY:

Right, and so what did the report say about security agencies and why they weren’t aware of the shooter before the attack?

SHAKIRA:
Well, the report notes that the security agencies prior to the Christchurch attack were almost exclusively focussed on the potential threat from Islamic extremism. That was where all their resources and all their attention was directed. However, they found that even if they had been monitoring far right extremism, they could only have stopped him by chance because his profile was just not high enough. They wouldn't have seen him even if they'd been looking for him. And a lot of New Zealand Muslims find that difficult to swallow.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“We’ve known for a long time that the Muslim comminity has been unfairly targeted with hatespeech and hate crimes.”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“I choose Christchurch because it's so peaceful, I never heard of anything in New Zealand.”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“This tragedy happened and nobody wants it.”

SHAKIRA:
This also comes back to the sense of frustrations that Muslims had at having raised their concerns over and over and over again and been dismissed or patted on the head and sent on our way or treated as though we were just trying to not get our own house in order.

RUBY:

Mmm ok. And the New Zealand government has responded to the report - saying they accept its recommendations - things like greater resourcing for social cohesion and better coordination of security organisations. So what do you make of of Jacinda Ardern’s response?

SHAKIRA:
I don't want to romanticise New Zealand versus Australia. But the New Zealand government has said that they will act on the recommendations of the royal commission.

Archival tape -- Jacinda Ardern:

“Let me start by outlining some of the plans that we can announce from today. Firstly, we agree in principle with the 44 recommendations.”

SHAKIRA:
Jacinda Ardern, of course, apologised immediately for the shortcomings identified in the report.

Archival tape -- Jacinda Ardern:

“They were failings nonetheless. And for that, on behalf of the government, I apologise. This report also identifies a permissive firearm regime. For that we all must take responsibility.”

SHAKIRA:
There's been no apology forthcoming from the Australian authorities. Muslims who lived in both Australia and New Zealand were saying Australia is worse. And they would say, oh, well, we don't have the Murdoch media here. You've got the Murdoch media there.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“Does our refugee program put Australians in danger?”

SHAKIRA:
And so although Islamophobia here in New Zealand is bad, but it's nothing like as bad as it is in Australia, I couldn't live there.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“A very responsible piece last week by Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian newspaper, he too wrote about Muslim immigration. He was right to say all generalizations about it are subject to countless exceptions, or to use the cliche - ‘not all Muslims are terrorists but most terrorists are Muslim’.”

SHAKIRA:
I couldn't live with that type of racism.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“It’s a problem that’s been a long time coming. It started in the 1980s with a family reunion, unskilled Muslim migration to Western Sydney, whole or large parts of suburbs have welfare dependecy problems. It pains me to say in Western Sydney there is a Muslim problem.”

SHAKIRA:
It's easy to say, oh well, he was self radicalised. It was the Internet. He got all this material from online. You know, he was devouring hate literature from France, from America, from wherever else. But you don't need to go looking for that stuff in Australia. Actually, it's in the air we breathe. You know, he went looking for the hard stuff, but he got the soft stuff just from the mainstream media. He arrived in New Zealand with his fascist worldview already fully formed and with the intention to commit an act of violence in New Zealand. His hate was manufactured here, not in New Zealand.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Shakira, how has the Australian media been covering the the royal commission report into the Christchurch massacre, particularly in comparison to the way it covered the massacre itself when it happened?

SHAKIRA:
...in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. It received, of course, pretty well saturation coverage, but saturation coverage of a problematic type. They looked, of course, for details of the gunman. They said his name over and over again. They used his image. They humanised him. They did everything wrong, providing a how-to manual basically. When Fraser Manning said that the massacre was a result of Muslim immigration,

Archival tape -- Fraser Manning:

“Countries that have Muslim immigration invariably have escalation in violence and then terrorist attacks and murders.”

SHAKIRA:
Which, okay, it was if there were no Muslims in New Zealand to massacre, he wouldn't have had any victims. But like, how is that an appropriate response? It's their fault for being born, it’s their fault for breathing, if you're going to take that angle. And he had said that on Twitter and then Kyle and Jackie-O gave him the chance to say it on breakfast radio.

Archival tape -- Jackie-O:

“Comments that you've made have, you know, put a lot of people offside. They've angered a lot of people. You must understand that part…”

Archival tape -- Fraser Manning:

“...a lot of people have been listening to the left-wing media spin of my press release…”

SHAKIRA:
And they did not challenge him in any significant way. On the other hand, when the royal commission report was released, it's received very little coverage at all. I had expected that it would be close to the lead story. It was not. I think people can afford to pay some attention to this event, particularly given that there are warnings that the far-right is thriving under the conditions of the pandemic.

RUBY:

Hmm. Can we talk a little bit more about that? Because it does seem quite possible that this won't be the last far-right attack to come from an Australian.

SHAKIRA:
I would like to believe that that's not the case, but I'm afraid that you may be correct. And we've seen just in the past week a teenager arrested in New South Wales for threatening violence against various minority communities.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“It's alleged he used white supremacist and neo-Nazi chat groups to urge others to commit violent terrorist acts.”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“Police have been watching him since August in closed forums on social media.”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“Almost anyone that didn't look like him, but more specifically, it's non-whites. It's the immigrants. It's people of the Jewish and Islamic faith.”

SHAKIRA:
This is consistent with warnings about how the potential offenders are getting younger and younger and younger. This kid, you know, that makes him sound cute. That makes it sound like your little brother, that makes him sound, you know, um just naughty. But if these allegations are correct, he wasn't just naughty, he was dangerous and he was 18 and if there isn't an attack, it will be because as in this case, it was pre-empted he was noticed first.

RUBY:

So we’re seeing these warnings from security agencies and police in Australia. But in terms of how our politicians respond, and the way the media behaves, do you see much changing, as a result of this Royal Commission report?

SHAKIRA:
I have to say, I'm not optimistic. And again, the various measures that have been taken over Islamic extremism don't set a good precedent. The ALP called for there to be a parliamentary enquiry into the threat of far right terror.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“The right-wing extremist threat is real and it is growing and it is capable of carrying out a terrorist attack.”

SHAKIRA:
Instead, Peter Dutton has signed off on an inquiry with a broader scope.

Archival tape -- Peter Dutton:

Extreme right-wing extremism. Islamic extremism, I know the labour party seeks to make a difference between the two. They’re not.

SHAKIRA:
Looking at all forms of extremism, including Islamic extremism and the far-right for balance, as though Islamic extremism hasn't been examined over and over and over again. This was an atrocity that was committed against the Muslim community. Could we not have an inquiry about a threat to the Muslim community rather than yet another inquiry about why the Muslim community is a threat in itself?

It reminds me of how prior to the Christchurch attack, whenever there was these government forums and roundtables or whatever on countering violent extremism and when you would turn up, it would always be just about exclusively Islamic extremism. And every now and again, they'd mention the far-right for balance. But given that the emphasis has been so exclusively on Muslims for so long, I think having an inquiry that was only about the far-right would only be a starting point.

RUBY:

Now that this report is out, what kinds of things would you, I suppose, hope or want Australians to reflect upon, now that we know what we do about what happened?

SHAKIRA:
I would like us to reflect on the fact that while this atrocity was the work of one individual and I accept the commission's findings that he didn't have any collaborators, but he does have a lot of sympathisers. He does have a lot of people who are unlikely to take similar measures themselves but think, ‘yeah, good for him, that's what we need’. And I would like us to reflect on the fact that speech encouraging that kind of action has been heard at far-right rallies within the presence of large numbers of police officers. And no action was taken, sometimes slightly coded and sometimes not coded at all. We allow this type of incitement to pass without notice.

And attending various far right rallies in the years before the Christchurch attack and hearing really the most vitriolic hate speech from speakers on the podium in the abstract, I would have thought that I would find it distressing to be sitting there listening to this kind of inflammatory hate speech that was directed at me and my community. But it actually wasn't because it's so normal, because we hear that in mainstream media all the time, because it gets aired in the national parliament all the time and it's not challenged seriously enough and often enough.

RUBY:

Shakira, thank you so much for your time today.

SHAKIRA:
Thank you so much for having me.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

US President-elect Joe Biden has praised the rule of law and the constitution in a speech after the Electoral College confirmed his election win. He said the will of the people prevailed and that he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received more votes "than any ticket received in the history of America."

And underworld figure Tony Mokbel has had one of his drug convictions quashed, as a result of the Lawyer X scandal. The decision to overturn his conviction for cocaine importation came after prosecutors conceded that Nicola Gobbo had been a registered informer while representing Mokbel.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.