Napier, MSCNewsWire, 25 March 2016 -The release of the Intelligence and Security Review triggered the predictable and ostentatiously righteous response from the political class centred exclusively on their own fine sense of their own security from unwanted surveillance.

This pretty much drowned out the matter of actually thwarting insurgents of the type that need to kill you, the more harmless you are the better from the insurgent side.

In the event the review contained the strength of simplicity in its main recommendation to consolidate the two main security agencies the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communication Security Bureau.

A few days after the release of this review came though the Brussels attacks. These had the effect here, however momentary, of dissipating the quasi-official, self-regarding, and self-publicising smokescreen that customarily shrouds the menace.

For a brief period the chaff of high-minded distracting political pseudo-purity lifted to reveal some of the main threats, as distinct from the civil rights ones. These centre on New Zealand’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of the insurgents.

The weaknesses:-   1. New Zealand’s reliance on high-end tourism which in turn is reliant on the internationally perceived safety of only several international airports   2. The tradition of huge population concentrations at frequent leisure events that are scheduled and publicised long before they actually happen   3. An embedded and long-existing high measure of officially-condoned acceptance and tolerance here toward deliberately-displayed collective anti-social behaviour such as that demonstrated by gangs and other such stand-over groups.   4. A widely held belief and one is that officially encouraged by government sponsored institutions such as universities that insurgents are exclusively drawn from the male dispossessed. That insurgents from foot-soldiers to planners and strategists    can only be drawn from the male oppressed.   5. The belief, deliberately officially-nurtured, to the effect that any official helping-hand automatically generates a reciprocal and positive obligation   6. The residual frontier-era tolerance here everywhere of the ease of access to weaponry, combined with a relative ease of access to explosives and/or their ingredients..

The strengths:-   1. New Zealand does not yet have any faith-based ghettos   2. The country does not have a diversity and thus confusion in terms of languages   3. The duo-culture is centred on an Oceanian and British inheritance and thus does not yet in practice have an obligation    to the faith-based from other domains   4. Geographic isolation   5. The official visibility here and thus surveillance of the existing underworld networks likely to sustain insurgents   6. Sparsely populated