Kia ora koutou
Ko Andrew Hampton tōku ingoa. I’m the Director-General of Security at the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service.
Thank you for the opportunity to address you today.
Next month will be a year since I became Director-General at the NZSIS.
It has been a real privilege to lead this organisation, particularly to witness first-hand the kind of work our people do each day to keep New Zealand and New Zealanders safe and secure.
Our team is driven by the ethos that we partner with others for impact. This will be a key theme of my comments today.
But first, I will brief you on my agency’s insights on the current threats facing New Zealand and how we deliver impact through threat detection, deterrence and disruption.
New Zealand’s violent extremism environment
Countering violent extremism and terrorism is an enduring priority for us and continues to occupy around half of our investigative time, with the remainder dominated by foreign interference and espionage.
New Zealand’s National Terrorism Threat Level currently stands at LOW. That means we consider a terrorist attack to be a realistic possibility, but that we’re not seeing specific attack planning at this time. To be clear – it doesn’t mean there is no threat.
There is enough vile rhetoric online to suggest there are people who may have the motivation to launch an attack, and there are a small number of known violent extremists who continue to draw significant investigative resource.
Five years on, the Christchurch attacks still cast a long shadow and continue to inspire identity-motivated violent extremists here and overseas. But there has also been a range of positive improvements in the past five years in terms of the way NZSIS operates. There is more emphasis on threat discovery including through increased online capability, much improved inter-agency collaboration, and very genuine community engagement.
The memories of the 51 Shuhada are never far from our thoughts in carrying out this important work.
Across our counter-terrorism function, investigative efforts are fairly evenly split between faith, identity, and politically-motivated groups and individuals. However, we’re also seeing an emerging trend where violent extremists are motivated by highly personalised ideologies with no strong allegiance to a specific violent extremist cause or group.
Indeed, it is looking like those with fluid ideological convictions could become our most prominent subjects of investigation.
We are very live to the potential impact of the conflicts in Gaza and the Red Sea, both internationally and domestically. Communities with connections to the region are feeling both vulnerable and threatened, and this is compounded by the volume of hate spread online. We also know that internationally the conflicts are being used by terrorist organisations to drive radicalisation and recruitment.
There is the possibility that these conflicts could provide a catalyst for motivating someone in New Zealand to undertake an identity, political, or faith motivated attack. However, we assess that the greatest risk domestically is spontaneous violence driven by emotion, rather than a terrorist act.
Countering violent extremist threats is a complex challenge but it’s important that I inform the committee that there have been successes. I can’t provide specific details in this forum but there have been a number of instances over the past five years where our team, working with others, have detected and disrupted terrorist threats.
Foreign interference and espionage
The foreign interference and espionage environment is equally complex and fast evolving, driven by geostrategic competition.
Last August NZSIS published an unclassified threat assessment, which included more detail than we have released before about the nature of foreign interference and espionage in New Zealand. It’s been a game changer in terms of helping make the threat more real for those potentially affected by this kind of activity.
But we don’t just identify the threats, we are equally focused on helping organisations manage the risk, including through a range of publicly available advice.
The next NZSIS annual assessment will be published in August.
Foreign interference has the potential to corrode our democratic institutions, damage our economic prosperity and compromise New Zealander’s safety, security and human rights.
In New Zealand we see:
State actors or their proxies seeking to covertly build long-term influence with individuals in our national political environment;
Local government is becoming a more common target;
Our business community is increasingly susceptible too, including state sponsored attempts to steal hard-earned intellectual property or sensitive information; and
The monitoring and harassment of ethnic communities is becoming more sophisticated and even more insidious.
Foreign states like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or the Republic of Iran have ways to make life difficult for those who dare speak out against those governments. That’s simply unacceptable in a country like New Zealand.
When I reference those countries, I am talking specifically about the state and those who act on its behalf, not the Chinese or Iranian people as a whole and certainly not community members in New Zealand. In many cases it’s those very communities we need to protect.
Impact of PRC interference
At a global level, New Zealanders have been drawn into a wider PRC strategy to strengthen the capability and lethality of its People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Over the past 18 months, the NZSIS has identified seven New Zealand citizens who were contracted by a third party to support military aviation training to the PLA.
The training and expertise they were passing on was gained through previous employment with partner militaries and the New Zealand Defence Force.
Such activity clearly poses a major national security risk and it is not in New Zealand’s interests to have former military personnel training another military who does not share the same values as our own. I consider it important this kind of activity is called out.
After threat mitigation activities by the NZSIS and the introduction of legislation in partner countries, all seven individuals have recently left their training roles but the risk remains that other New Zealanders may be lured by high salaries to replace them.
General Election 2023
Prior to the General Election our agencies worked with the Electoral Commission and other election participants, including political parties and candidates to increase their awareness of threats, and how to migrate them.
As New Zealanders would expect, the NZSIS conducted proactive threat discovery work during the period around the General Election to detect signs of foreign interference.
Our assessment is that it is highly unlikely foreign state activity affected the outcome of the vote. However, we assess that there were almost certainly several foreign states using the occasion as an opportunity to conduct long-term influence building.
The activity we detected was highly likely aimed at building influence with political candidates and parties, which is easier to do during the election period when they are more accessible.
It is also unlikely the election was the target of any large scale state-backed disinformation campaign, which is consistent with the nature of the disinformation environment discussed in our unclassified assessment.
Importance of partnerships
I know that when we paint a picture of the threat environment in isolation it can look rather bleak. What is more positive is that there is a great deal of work happening, most of it in concert with others, that is placing us ahead of the threat.
Last October I stood on stage in California with New Zealand’s Five Eyes partners to warn against the threat of economic espionage. At the same time, we jointly promoted a set of secure innovation principles that any organisation can use to protect their precious intellectual property from those who wish to steal it. These principles can apply equally to any New Zealand innovator as much as they do to Silicon Valley.
Our work also frequently involves supporting Pacific partners to build their own national security resilience. Just this month, our Cook Islands partners put in place their own protective security policy framework for government, modelled closely on NZSIS’s own Protective Security Requirements.
There is a lot we can do with the New Zealand public too. Our guide for identifying signs of violent extremism remains as relevant now as when we published it 16 months ago. If the public can tell us when they see some of the behaviours and activities outlined in the guide, then I have no doubt that more attack plans will be disrupted.
Alongside the GCSB, we have recently published our organisational strategies for the coming years on our websites. If we are to continue building deeper partnerships with a wide range of New Zealanders, it is important that we are clear about who we are as an organisation and what we seek to achieve for New Zealand.