The New Zealand government’s willingness to talk frankly and openly about the growing number of national security challenges it faces took another step forward this week with the release of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service’s (NZSIS) 2024 Security Threat Environment assessment.
The NZSIS report is only the second of its kind. The first was released last August amid a flurry of strategy documents late in the life of the Ardern-Hipkins Labour government. The follow up is a sign the agency clearly wants to step out of the shadows and make a more regular contribution to New Zealand’s nascent public conversation on national security. The report’s introduction stresses it is an independent threat assessment, not government policy. It also declares this will be an “annual publication”.
Collectively, the NZSIS cases collectively paint a vivid picture of a complex set of external and internal threats to business, government, and community groups.
The assessment paints a picture of a world in which New Zealand and New Zealanders are increasingly exposed to a range of security risks and in which the country’s geographic remoteness no longer serves as a safety blanket. It describes a “deteriorating violent extremist environment” globally, warning that the conflict in Gaza is being used for online radicalisation. “White identity motivated violent extremism” remains the dominant ideology of its kind in New Zealand, with a small number of faith-motivated cases beginning to re-emerge. A growing area of concern is what it calls “mixed, unstable and unclear ideologies” where people are embracing multiple, often contradictory, violent extremist narratives. The overall threat of a terror attack is assessed as “low” but that still means it is a “realistic possibility”.
But it is the report’s expansive sections on foreign interference and espionage that will doubtless draw the most attention. Last year’s assessment named China, Russia, and Iran as state actors involved in foreign interference in New Zealand. This year’s report spends more time explaining out the nature and scope of the challenge, adding detail and multiple case studies in an effort to build public understanding.
China is the key focus. Beijing is described as a “complex intelligence challenge”, one of a “small number of illiberal states” that carry out “malicious activit[ies]” in the country. The report says that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) carries out interference activities against New Zealand’s diverse Chinese communities, using front groups to stifle dissent and amplify perspectives that are sympathetic to Beijing’s interests. One of the case studies says an un-named New Zealand Chinese-language news outlet is “almost certainly responsive to PRC direction and repeats approved talking points in New Zealand.”
On espionage, the report devotes a section to the “insider threat”, highlighting the well-documented use of networking sites such as LinkedIn by intelligence agencies to try and recruit sources in business or government. It talks about a case where a foreign state manufactured a business opportunity to build influence with a “politically connected New Zealander” as part of a covert influence-building campaign. In an extended interview timed to coincide with the report’s launch, Director-General of Security Andrew Hampton told Radio New Zealand the person was not a Member of Parliament but was connected to one of the country’s political parties. Hampton also warned about the use of front companies seeking to establish satellite tracking stations and high-powered telescopes in New Zealand while concealing their links to foreign governments.
Little of this will be surprising to anyone who has been following these issues closely in Australia, Canada, Europe, or Southeast Asia. But New Zealand’s ministers or government agencies have rarely talked about foreign interference or espionage in any detail before. The 2023 National Security Strategy included “foreign interference and espionage” as one of 12 “core” national security issues but discussed it at a high level of abstraction. Collectively, the NZSIS cases collectively paint a vivid picture of a complex set of external and internal threats to business, government, and community groups.
No one can say that New Zealanders aren’t increasingly being given the information they need to better understand the complex security risks and threats the country faces.
There are occasional surprises in the report. In curious language, the report says that “strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific has, for the past decade or so, been largely framed as being between the People’s Republic of China and New Zealand and its traditional security partners”. This will be a surprise to the various New Zealand governments that have spent much of the last decade rejecting precisely that framing.
More importantly, the same section strives to make the point that strategic competition is about more than the United States and China. It notes that there are other growing “centres of power and influence”. These include “a range of countries including those with which New Zealand is growing its relationships, whether India or in Southeast Asia.” A single, subtle reference to India in the report might seem unremarkable, but at a time when several of New Zealand’s Five Eyes partners have made serious allegations of foreign interference from Delhi, its inclusion should raise an eyebrow. As Australia has found, publicly calling out everyone engaged in foreign interference can get complicated when the actors are “friendly” nations.
The report’s introduction muses hopefully that we might see a tradition develop where community groups and organisations around New Zealand use the annual report as a starting point for a conversation about keeping themselves safe and secure. That seems optimistic, but no one can say that New Zealanders aren’t increasingly being given the information they need to better understand the complex security risks and threats the country faces.
