Table of Contents
David Cumin
IINZ
1) The Promise
The date 15 March 2019 is seared into New Zealand’s national memory. On a clear Friday afternoon in Christchurch, a 28-year-old Australian white supremacist walked into two mosques and opened fire on worshippers gathered for Jumu’ah (Friday prayers). Fifty-one people were killed. Forty-nine more were wounded. It was the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand’s history, and the worst terrorist attack the country had ever experienced.
The gunman had spent months preparing. He posted a lengthy manifesto online before the attack, saturated with the language of the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory: the delusion that white populations in Western nations are being deliberately supplanted by immigrants and minorities, directed by a shadowy elite. He live-streamed the murders on Facebook. The footage spread instantly, watched by millions around the world before platforms scrambled to remove it.
New Zealand was shaken to its foundations. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wore hijab when she met with survivors and the bereaved. Parliament fast-tracked gun law reforms. The country entered a period of genuine national reckoning, grappling with how a mass casualty terrorist attack had been allowed to occur – and asking what needed to change.
To find answers, the government established a Royal Commission of Inquiry: a formal, independent investigation with powers to compel testimony and examine documents that are not normally available to the public. Led by Sir William Young and Hon Jacqui Crendall, the commission spent 18 months gathering evidence from survivors, community leaders, intelligence officials, and international experts. Its 800-page report, published in December 2020 under the title Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei (“This is our home”) made 44 recommendations for change across government, intelligence, policing, and civil society.
Recommendation 14 was specific and clear: the government should fund “a programme to fund independent New Zealand-specific research on the causes of, and measures to prevent, violent extremism and terrorism.” Not right-wing extremism alone. Not any single ideological threat. Violent extremism in all its forms.[1]
The government pledged to act. A new national research centre would be created. It would carry the name He Whenua Taurikura (“A country at peace”). It would be funded with millions of dollars of public money. And it would, the government promised, help ensure that New Zealand never again failed to see danger before it struck.
More than six years on, a global surge in antisemitic violence (including some of the conspiracy theories that also appeared in the Christchurch attacker’s manifesto) has reached levels not seen since the second world war. A troubling question demands to be asked: Did the centre tasked with preventing violent extremism actually fulfil that mandate? Or did it reflect the very blind spots it was created to address?
“The threat to New Zealanders – from individuals with a range of identity, faith and political motivations – remains a pressing one.” – Bridget White, DPMC
2) The Hui: When a Counter-Extremism Event Became a Flashpoint
Before He Whenua Taurikura even existed, there was the hui.
In 2021, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) organised the National Hui on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism in Christchurch. The choice of Christchurch was deliberate. This was to be a solemn, purposeful gathering, a statement of national resolve. DPMC handpicked the participants: academics, community leaders, activists, and government officials. It was intended to model the kind of inclusive, broad-minded dialogue that would inform New Zealand’s counter-extremism response for years to come.
What happened instead would prove to be an omen.
Juliet Moses was among the invited speakers. A practising lawyer in Auckland, Moses serves as the spokeswoman for the peak representative body for New Zealand’s Jewish community of around 7,500 people, the New Zealand Jewish Council. She has worked publicly alongside Muslim leaders on shared concerns about rising extremism.
Moses took the floor during a panel session titled “Addressing the Causes – How can embracing community and diversity approaches contribute to preventing and countering violent extremism?” She spoke about cooperation between Jewish and Muslim leadership. She spoke about the importance of naming threats honestly and consistently. And then she made a point that she considered both obvious and essential: that any genuine commitment to countering terrorism had to apply across all forms of political violence, regardless of who was committing it or in whose name.
As part of making that point, she referenced Hezbollah and Hamas.
To understand why those names provoked such a fierce reaction, it is worth pausing to explain what these organisations are. Hamas is a Palestinian Islamist group that has governed the Gaza Strip since seizing power in 2007. Founded in 1987, its charter calls explicitly for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. Over the decades it has carried out suicide bombings on Israeli buses and in market squares, rocket attacks on civilian areas, and numerous other attacks resulting in civilian deaths. Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist movement, founded in 1982 with ideological and material support from Iran. It functions simultaneously as a political party, a social services provider, and one of the most heavily armed non-state military forces in the world. Both organisations have long been designated terrorist groups by the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the European Union.
At the time of the 2021 hui, New Zealand had not yet formally proscribed either organisation (only their ‘military wings’). Moses noted this gap, referencing a Queen Street protest in 2018 at which a banner supporting Hezbollah had been prominently displayed. She also mentioned a 2021 rally on the same street at which speakers had called for the “globalisation of the intifada”. For those not familiar, ‘intifada’ references the Palestinian uprisings of the late 1980s and early 2000s that included at least 140 suicide bombings and other terror attacks against Israelis[2].
Moses did not finish her sentence.
From the audience came heckling, voices shouting “Free Palestine”. The official video feed of the event, managed by DPMC, cut abruptly.[3] When it resumed, Moses continued speaking. She was heckled again. The feed cut again.
What the cameras missed was visible to those in the room. Approximately a dozen of the DPMC-invited guests rose from their seats and walked out. The walkout was striking, not just as a protest, but because of who participated. Among those who left was Valerie Morse, a Wellington activist whom media reports have variously described as an anarchist. Morse is perhaps most publicly known for burning a New Zealand flag at an Anzac Day dawn service in Wellington in 2007. She was also one of 18 people arrested during Operation Eight that same year, in New Zealand’s most significant domestic terrorism investigation in which police alleged that a group had been conducting paramilitary training in the Urewera mountain ranges with firearms and what authorities alleged was napalm. Charges against Morse were later reduced, and she was ultimately acquitted on the remaining charges. Her presence at a government-organised counter-extremism conference, as an invited guest, was itself a question waiting to be asked.
The walkout was apparently led by Abdur Razzaq, a spokesperson for the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand (FIANZ), the country’s largest umbrella body for Muslim communities. Razzaq told those present that Moses had politicised the event and weaponised references to Hezbollah as a “bogie” to promote fear and the “securitisation of Islam”. That academic term refers to the framing of Muslim communities primarily through the lens of security threats, a practice that has been widely criticised for generating stigma and distrust. Razzaq also alleged that Moses’s remarks were a calculated attempt to denigrate Muslims and to “wipe out the memory” of those killed in the 15 March attacks.
Those who had been in the room, and those who subsequently read the full transcript of Moses’s speech[4], found this characterisation extremely difficult to reconcile with what she had actually said. Her remarks had included explicit tributes to collaborative work between Jewish and Muslim communities. She had framed her argument not against Muslims, but for consistency in condemning terrorism – a principle that, by its own logic, applied equally to far-right white supremacist violence of exactly the kind that had struck Christchurch. The charge that her comments were designed to “wipe out the memory” of the mosque attack victims was, given her full remarks, a striking reversal of the truth.
After the panel concluded, events became sufficiently alarming that Moses required a police escort. She was taken through the service corridors of the venue, via the back entrance, to avoid the crowd of conference participants that had gathered in the lobby. Every person at that conference had been personally selected by DPMC. The only Jewish speaker at a counter-extremism conference had to be escorted out the back by police.
3) Terror Endorsed – From a Conference on Countering Terror
If the walkout was unsettling, what came next was extraordinary.
During the question-and-answer session, Sayed Taghi Derhami took the microphone. Derhami is an elder associated with the Islamic Ahlulbayt Foundation of New Zealand, a Shia Islamic organisation based in Auckland. He spoke directly and without ambiguity.
“Somebody mentioned here Hezbollah and Hamas being terrorists,” he said. “They are not terrorists. They are defending their land, and I would be defending New Zealand if New Zealand is taken over with force.”[5]
At a national conference on countering terrorism and violent extremism, organised by the government, and convened in the city where 51 people had been murdered by a terrorist two years earlier, it is remarkable that a government-invited participant stood up and declared that two internationally designated terrorist organisations were, in his view, not terrorists at all.
This was not the first time Derhami had made such statements in public. Four years earlier, in 2017, he had spoken at a Quds Day[6] event in Auckland. There, he described Israel as a “cancerous tumour” that needed to be “surgically removed.” At the same event, the mosque imam characterised what he called the “Zionist regime” as hiding behind what he described as the “fake phenomenon” of the Holocaust, which he portrayed as a conspiracy to infiltrate Islamic countries. These were statements denying a genocide that claimed six million Jewish lives and endorsing the violent destruction of a UN member state. The Islamic Ahlulbayt Foundation had also organised the 2018 Queen Street protest that Moses had referenced in her speech, at which banners reading “Hezballah [sic] is the symbol of resistance in the face of aggression” were displayed.
At the 2021 hui, the room contained people whose professional responsibilities gave them the standing and the obligation to respond. The Chief Human Rights Commissioner of New Zealand was present. Multiple senior DPMC officials (the host agency) and senior officials from security organisations were also in the room.
None of them said anything.
One person spoke. Dr David Cumin, a member of Auckland’s Jewish community stood up and stated plainly what had just occurred: that at a conference convened to counter violent extremism, participants had expressed open support for organisations designated as terrorist groups, and that no one in an official capacity had challenged it. The official video record of the event cut off his remarks before he had finished[7].
When DPMC later published its official summary of the hui proceedings, none of this was recorded. Not Derhami’s declaration that Hamas and Hezbollah were not terrorists. Not the walkout. Not the heckling. Not the police escort. Not Cumin’s interrupted intervention. The official document described a productive dialogue. It was as though none of it had happened.
4) Building He Whenua Taurikura – and the First Red Flag
From that fraught gathering, He Whenua Taurikura emerged. Established in June 2022 and hosted at Victoria University of Wellington, it was funded through a charitable trust structure, with DPMC as the principal funder. The initial 2023/24 conditional grant was worth $1,459,147 (excluding GST), with $825,000 allocated to research and $500,000 to operating costs.[8]
The centre’s stated mission was, on paper, unimpeachable: “to contribute to an Aotearoa where everyone is safe in their diverse identities, by producing and coordinating research into countering and preventing terrorism and violent extremism, while promoting social cohesion”.[9]
The first sign that something might be amiss came before the centre had published a single piece of research.
Early media reports indicated that the inaugural director would be Professor Richard Jackson, then based at the University of Otago. Jackson is one of New Zealand’s most prolific academic writers on terrorism. He has published numerous books and articles, co-founded the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism, and is widely cited in international scholarship. On paper, his credentials appeared strong.
But shortly after his selection was reported, he was quietly dropped. The reason that came to light was a damning independent review of a research centre he had previously led at Otago. That review found the centre had developed what it described as a “toxic and unproductive culture that is paralysing, isolating and divisive”, and characterised it as “a culturally unsafe environment for new Māori staff”. Among the review’s 22 recommendations was that a new director be appointed.
That alone might have been sufficient cause for reconsideration. But there was considerably more.
Jackson describes himself, in his own academic writing and public interviews, as a “terrorist sympathiser”. He uses the term in a specific scholarly sense, arguing that truly effective counter-terrorism requires researchers to understand why people turn to political violence – to inhabit their perspective rather than simply condemn it. This is a legitimate methodological position within the academic study of terrorism, and it has defenders. But the gap between theoretical empathy and apparent moral endorsement can narrow quickly in practice, and Jackson’s public record gave serious cause for concern.
In 2021, Jackson signed a petition in public support of Professor David Miller, a British academic at the University of Bristol. Miller had publicly described Jewish students on his campus as “pawns” of Israel, which he characterised as “a violent, racist, foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”. Miller had also described a London mosque event at which Muslims and Jews came together to cook chicken soup as “a Trojan horse for normalising Zionism in the Muslim community”. The implication being that even cooking together constitutes a form of political subversion. Miller was later dismissed by Bristol University following an independent investigation. Jackson’s public support for him raised immediate and serious questions about his own views on Jewish communities and their place in public life.
Jackson’s more recent social media activity amplified those concerns. He has posted denials that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure, human shields, and civilian areas to conduct military operations, despite senior Hamas leaders openly admitting to the practice in television interviews.[10] He has endorsed conspiracy theories alleging that Israel deliberately sterilised Ethiopian Jewish immigrants. He has described Israel as “a pathologically violent society”. He has drawn comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.
The decision to quietly drop Jackson after he had already been selected was, in retrospect, correct. But the fact that he had been considered, let alone selected, for a position leading a centre dedicated to the prevention of violent extremism and the promotion of social cohesion was an uncomfortable origin for HWT.
“HWT appears to have conceived countering and preventing terrorism as a career into the untamed wilds of identity studies, grievance politics and activism.” – Dr John Battersby, Massey University
5) The Co-Directors: Expertise and Controversy
In place of Jackson, HWT appointed two inaugural co-directors: Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley, and Professor Joanna Kidman.
Spoonley, a sociologist at Massey University, is one of New Zealand’s most respected authorities on immigration, multiculturalism, and the far right. He has been studying white nationalist movements in New Zealand since the 1980s and has published widely on their evolution, their recruitment practices, and their relationship to mainstream politics.
Kidman’s appointment was more contested. A professor of Māori education at Victoria University of Wellington, her academic work focuses on indigenous knowledge systems, colonial history, and decolonisation. But Kidman’s public persona had extended well beyond the academy, and it was her conduct in that public sphere that attracted scrutiny.
In 2024, amid heated political debates about the coalition government’s education and social policies, Kidman posted on X that the government “hates children, most of whom will be poor and brown”. She described the government as resembling a “death cult”. She reposted imagery that critics interpreted as evoking violence against “colonisers”. When colleagues came under fire for statements perceived by many as antisemitic, she publicly defended them. Following a significant wave of criticism, Kidman made her X account private.
These were not merely intemperate online exchanges in a forum that most people never see. They were the public statements of someone serving as co-director of a government-funded national research centre whose explicit purpose was to reduce violent extremism and promote social cohesion. The distance between that stated purpose and those public statements was considerable.
A separate procedural problem also emerged. Kidman had been a member of the panel responsible for selecting the co-directors, including herself. Dr John Battersby, an academic at Massey University who specialises in terrorism and counter-terrorism, drew attention to this arrangement in an article for the Post newspaper in 2024. He described the appointment process as lacking transparency and accountability, and raised broader concerns about the centre’s intellectual direction.
In that article, Battersby made two further observations worth dwelling on. First, that HWT’s staff and research associates appeared “light on experience researching terror” in the analytical, operational sense: the close study of how terrorist movements form, recruit, radicalise, plan and act. Second, that the history of actual political violence in New Zealand suggested this gap mattered. Violence of the kind that could genuinely be defined as terrorism in this country had, Battersby wrote, “generally germinated among individuals absenting themselves from social norms, objecting to the cohesion of society rather than being deterred by it. It has more often emerged from the left, rather than the right of New Zealand’s tiny cadres of extremists.” His conclusion was blunt: “HWT appears to have conceived countering and preventing terrorism as a career into the untamed wilds of identity studies, grievance politics and activism.”
6) The Board and the Research Committee
DPMC ran a public expressions-of-interest process for the governance board in March 2022.[11] Fifty-seven candidates applied. Eleven were interviewed by Andy George, DPMC’s counter-terrorism strategic coordinator and one of the organisers of the 2021 hui, and Julia Macdonald, a principal policy advisor in the National Security Group.[12]
The five non-government board members eventually appointed were: Bernie O’Donnell, a Māori governance specialist and business consultant; Dave Moskovitz, a professional director and well-known figure in Auckland’s Jewish community; Ikhlaq Kashkari, then president of the New Zealand Muslim Association; Professor Tracey McIntosh, a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Auckland; and Vanisa Dhiru, a community advocate with a focus on digital equity.[13] Andy George served as the government’s own representative.
Several of these appointments raised questions. Kashkari’s inclusion attracted attention after it emerged that in a 2022 podcast, he had drawn a comparison between Hamas and Ukrainian soldiers defending their country against Russian invasion. That is, equating the conduct of a globally designated terrorist organisation with that of a national army acting under internationally recognised frameworks for legitimate self-defence. The two situations are legally, morally, and factually distinct. Drawing an equivalence between them was, at minimum, a striking position for a member of a counter-extremism governance board.
Moskovitz, the board’s sole Jewish member, drew criticism from within the New Zealand Jewish community after he published a poem in November 2023, in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, that many readers understood to equate the violence perpetrated by Hamas that day with that of the Israel Defence Forces. This was particularly painful given the nature of what had occurred on 7 October: the deliberate massacre of civilians, the rape and mutilation of women, the taking of approximately 250 hostages including children and the elderly.[14]
McIntosh has a history of publicly advocating for the abolition of prisons. That is a position with principled adherents in criminology, but one that critics found incongruous with a senior governance role at a centre focused on preventing political violence. She would later, as acting chair of the trust board, take on a central role in negotiations with DPMC over the centre’s research priorities.
The research committee, responsible for overseeing the academic direction of the centre, comprised eight members. Most held academic positions in health, indigenous studies, communication, and social science. One, in particular, stood out for reasons directly relevant to the centre’s mandate.
Professor Mohan J Dutta holds the title of dean’s chair professor of communication at Massey University. His academic work centres on what he describes as “culture-centred approaches” to health communication and social justice, with a strong emphasis on anti-colonialism and the interests of marginalised communities. He is a prolific writer with an international academic profile.
His public response to the events of 7 October 2023 was recorded in real time on social media, and it demands to be understood in that context.
The Hamas-led attacks of that morning were among the worst atrocities committed against Jewish people since the Holocaust. Beginning in the early hours, militants broke through the border fence surrounding Gaza, swept into Israeli towns and kibbutzim, and spent hours killing, raping, mutilating, and abducting civilians. Families were murdered in their homes. Young people were shot at a music festival as they ran across open fields. Babies were killed. The elderly were dragged from their beds. The deliberate targeting of civilians, the systematic cruelty, the taking of hostages, and the filming of atrocities for propaganda purposes shocked governments and communities across the world.
On that same day, while the killings were still occurring, Professor Dutta posted: “The colonized has the fundamental human right to resist the colonizer. This right is protected by the UN.”
On 8 October, as the full scale of the massacre became clear, he shared maps depicting what he labelled “Zionist Colonization of Palestine,” warning that “the racist colonizer will try to silence you, label you a terrorist”. In subsequent posts, Dutta described the October 7 attacks as a “powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance”[15] and expressed solidarity with them.
To describe the deliberate massacre of civilians, including children, the elderly, and festival-goers shot in an open field, as a “powerful exemplar” of anything at all is, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary statement. It is all the more extraordinary when the person making it sits on the research committee of a government-funded centre established specifically to research and prevent violent extremism.
The framing Dutta employed warrants brief examination. His characterisation of the attacks as anti-colonial “resistance” reflects a perspective with some academic adherents, particularly in post-colonial studies. But the implication is that the mass murder of civilians is morally justified when the perpetrators define themselves as the oppressed. If this principle is applied consistently, it would provide moral cover for almost any atrocity committed by any group that characterises itself as subjugated. It is precisely this kind of ideological reasoning that counter-extremism research exists to analyse critically and counter, not to endorse.
7) What Was – and Wasn’t – Researched
The research programme that HWT actually funded provides another window into the centre’s real priorities.
The flagship projects outlined in the 2023 annual plan were: “Toxic Nostalgia”, an examination of white supremacist and nostalgia ideologies led by co-director Spoonley; “De-Radicalisation and Youth”, studying young people drawn into conspiracy theories and hate groups; and “Mau te Rongo/Restoring Peaceful Relations”, examining Māori communities and anti-government movements.[16]
Other funded projects included “Are New Zealand Christians at risk of radicalisation?” and “Understanding the nature and wellbeing impacts of anti-transgender extremism in Aotearoa”. Political commentator David Farrar reported that HWT also channelled funding to a range of hard-left activists, including Emmy Rākete, Byron Clark, Kate Hannah, and Kyle Matthews[17].
The OIA documents confirm that the centre funded 17 Master’s grants, six living-wage PhD scholarships, and one co-funded PhD grant between 2022 and 2023.[18] Scholarship recipients were kept anonymous in all public communications, including the centre’s website, on the grounds of safety.[19]
What the research programme conspicuously did not include was any serious inquiry into far-left extremism, violent Islamist terrorism, or antisemitism. This was not a minor gap in coverage. By 2023, antisemitic incidents in New Zealand were rising sharply. Jewish community organisations were reporting unprecedented levels of harassment and intimidation. Internationally, the picture was grimmer still, and growing worse. Yet New Zealand’s national centre for researching violent extremism apparently did not commission a single study examining the threat to Jewish communities in this country.
8) What the Documents Reveal
In early 2026, requests lodged under the Official Information Act produced a significant body of internal DPMC and Victoria University of Wellington correspondence and reports. These materials shed new light on the gap between HWT’s stated mandate and its actual performance, and on the relationship between the centre and its primary funder.
The documents reveal that by late 2023, a consolidated list of research priorities had been conveyed to HWT by government agencies. A board meeting excerpt from 7 December 2023 records that the centre’s investment “was not sufficient to reflect that as a priority”.[20] Government agencies, frustrated by HWT’s failure to address their needs, had begun commissioning counter-extremism research from other providers.
In March 2024, DPMC Executive Director Bridget White wrote directly to the HWT trust board. Her letter noted that “engagement with government agencies has not yet been operationalised”. This was a striking admission for a centre now in its second full year of funded operation.[21] She proposed a new condition on future funding: that at least 25 per cent of research funding be directed to responding to government agency priorities.
The trust board’s reply, in April 2024, was revealing. Acting chair Professor Tracey McIntosh wrote that the centre would allocate only 20 per cent to government-aligned priorities, and asked DPMC to accept the reduced figure.[22]
The centre that had been established to serve the government’s counter-extremism research needs was, in its own written correspondence with its funders, actively negotiating down its obligations to those funders.
The OIA documents also confirm that DPMC conducted its own shortlisting process for board and committee appointments.[23] Yet no correspondence has been identified in which concerns were raised about the public statements or conduct of any research committee or board member, including those who had, on the very day of the worst terrorist attack against Jewish people in decades, posted characterising the massacre as an act of principled resistance. This is despite concerns being raised with Prof Spoonley, at least.
9) The Consequences of Selective Vision
In 2024, the government significantly reduced HWT’s budget down to $500,000, and then cut it entirely. DPMC concluded the centre was “not the most effective and efficient use” of limited public money.[24] He Whenua Taurikura and its trust were wound up in late 2025.
The official statements accompanying the closure were measured and administrative in tone. What they did not address was the deeper question of why, across three years of operation and millions of dollars of public funding, New Zealand’s national centre for countering violent extremism apparently failed to produce any serious examination of the threats facing this country’s Jewish community.
The consequences of that failure were not abstract.
Since 7 October 2023, New Zealand has recorded a steep and sustained rise in antisemitic incidents: vandalism of Jewish institutions, harassment of Jewish individuals in public, threatening messages, abusive graffiti. Jewish community leaders in Auckland and Wellington describe an atmosphere of anxiety that is, in their words, without precedent in living memory. Jewish students have reported hiding their Star of David pendants at school. Families have received security threats at their homes. Synagogues have required police patrols during services.
Globally, the picture has been grimmer still. In December 2025, a gunman opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration near Sydney’s Bondi Beach, killing at least 15 people who had gathered at one of Australia’s most beloved public spaces to light candles and mark their festival of light. Two months before that, three people were murdered in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester. In June 2025, a man used a makeshift flamethrower to attack a group in Colorado who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – one woman died of her wounds. The month before that, two people were shot dead at a Jewish community event in Washington, DC.
These are the wages of ignoring warnings. They are what can happen when the institutions meant to analyse violent extremism are designed to look in only one direction. Recommendation 14 of the royal commission was explicit: the research programme was to examine violent extremism of all forms. Selective compliance cannot be passed off as a reasonable resource decision. Second, as Battersby noted, the pattern of actual political violence in New Zealand has historically emerged more from the left than the right. A centre committed to the evidence would have followed that pattern. HWT did not.
10) Questions That Remain
Multiple requests for comment, directed to figures associated with HWT, including co-director Paul Spoonley and DPMC’s Andy George have gone unanswered. Prof Spoonley was asked questions about Prof Dutta’s involvement at a Jewish community event in November, 2025, and refused to give any answers. Board member, Dave Moskovitz, wrote that he told the “the centre director… that I thought her choice [of appointing Dutta] was unwise” and he offered to have a discussion with us about the issues “after the board has been formally dissolved” but has refused to respond to follow-up questions.
The questions that remain are not complicated. They are, however, important.
How did individuals whose own public statements minimised, reframed, or in some cases celebrated acts of mass violence against civilians come to hold influential roles in a government-funded initiative specifically established to prevent such acts? How did a research centre whose committee included a member who described the worst terrorist attack against Jewish people in decades as a “powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance” operate for three years before the government withdrew its funding? How did the official record of the 2021 hui manage to omit entirely the heckling of the only Jewish speaker, the police escort, the expressions of support for designated terrorist organisations, and the only challenge to those expressions?
And what does a genuinely effective counter-extremism response look like?
The royal commission’s answer, in 2020, was not complicated. Fund independent research into violent extremism of all kinds. Ensure it is led by people with genuine expertise in terrorism and counter-terrorism. Make sure it serves the needs of the public institutions responsible for keeping New Zealanders safe. He Whenua Taurikura was, by the evidence of its own documents and the public record of its people, something significantly different from that vision.
References
[1]Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain on 15 March 2019, Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei: Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (2020), Recommendation 14.
[2] https://www.inss.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fe-3014381841.pdf
[3] https://www.youtube.com/live/kdKea2V-2Ww?si=cN_I2bQqR3Wh_Eau&t=18594
[5] https://www.youtube.com/live/kdKea2V-2Ww?si=mWScH1MOAOygqwLR&t=19546
[6] An annual international rally organised by Iran to express opposition to Israel.
[7] https://www.youtube.com/live/kdKea2V-2Ww?si=QWzJR0_AFcuDX5rM&t=20442
[8]Conditional Grant for He Whenua Taurikura — National Centre of Research Excellence 2023/24 (Item 02), released under the Official Information Act 1982, p. 1.
[9]He Whenua Taurikura 2023 Annual Plan, released under the Official Information Act 1982, p. 3.
[10] For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXZEzbT0H1s
[11] HWT Governance Board Expression of Interest Information (Item 03), released under the Official Information Act 1982.
[12] Ibid., p. 3.
[13] DPMC Memorandum: He Whenua Taurikura National Centre of Research Excellence — Governance Board and Trustee Appointments, 11 July 2022 (Item 05), pp. 3–4.
[14] https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147217
[15] https://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2023/10/zionist-hate-mongering-raceterror-trope.html
[16]He Whenua Taurikura 2023 Annual Plan, pp. 10–12.
[17] https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2024/10/govt_defunds_anti-extremism_centre_run_by_an_extremist.html
[18] Victoria University of Wellington OIA Response (OIA 005), 19 March 2026, p. 3.
[19] He Whenua Taurikura 2023 Annual Plan, pp. 15–17.
[20] Excerpt from He Whenua Taurikura Board Meeting Minutes, 7 December 2023, released in DPMC OIA Response (OIA-2025/26-0449), p. 3.
[21] Letter from Bridget White, Executive Director, National Security Group, DPMC, to the Board of He Whenua Taurikura Trust, 28 March 2024 (Item 02), p. 1.
[22] Letter from Professor Tracey McIntosh, Acting Chair, He Whenua Taurikura, to Bridget White, DPMC, 24 April 2024 (Item 01), released under the Official Information Act 1982.
[23] DPMC Response to OIA-2025/26-0449, p. 4.
[24] DPMC Response to OIA-2025/26-0449, 17 March 2026, p. 1.
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
