- Posted February 20, 2025
- Director-General Speeches
Wednesday 19 February, 2025
Kia ora koutou
Thank you for the opportunity to address you today.
The committee has received both the classified and unclassified versions of our annual report for the performance year under review. They include a summary of the refreshed NZSIS organisational strategy, launched in December 2023, which has a strong focus on our core service areas and the impacts we are seeking. We have included both quantitative data and illustrative case studies to demonstrate our impact, although through necessity, much of this material is only in the classified version.
As for the threats New Zealand faces, I will only make some overarching observations given there is already a lot of information in the public domain from our second annual Threat Environment Report released in September and in the commentary from the review of the National Terrorism Threat Level in December.
Another terrorist event in New Zealand remains a realistic possibility, with the most likely threat actor being an individual who has been self-radicalised, uses readily available weapons and seeks to avoid detection. Attacks are likely to happen with little or no warning. This assessment is informed by both the deteriorating global violent extremism environment and an increasingly complex domestic situation, including our ongoing concern about young people with mixed, unclear or unstable motivations to undertake a violent extremist act.
With regard to foreign interference and espionage, this is something New Zealanders continue to experience. Most of the activity is linked to a small number of illiberal states. Examples of foreign interference are wide ranging and impact a number of sectors within our society but most insidious is that which targets diaspora communities. No community should have to put up with such behaviour in a country like ours. We are firm in the belief that foreign interference needs to be called out when it occurs.
Key to New Zealand’s ability to respond to these threats is having informed and resilient citizens, communities and organisations in both the public and private sectors. Our public threat assessment is our main way of informing the public about national security threats and includes a range of real case studies of what happens here. We also work hard to provide practical advice to help communities and organisations make themselves harder targets for threatening behaviour and activity. For example, we have had positive feedback on our recently published guidance to help the tech sector protect its innovation and our Inwards Visits guide is helping a range of organisations manage risks associated with delegations visiting from overseas.
While the NZSIS is primarily a domestic-focussed agency, we are increasingly involved with intelligence cooperation and resilience building in the region. Drawing on New Zealand’s own domestic experience of countering foreign interference and espionage, we now routinely share intelligence and protective security advice with our Pacific partners to help inform their own decision-making. Our foreign intelligence mandate also allowed us and the GCSB to make a significant contribution to the all-of-government effort to secure the release of Phillip Mehrtens from West Papua, Indonesia.
Over the past year we have worked hard to meet the financial saving targets the Government has set for us and to ensure we can absorb the significant workforce and technology cost pressures we continue to face. This has involved a multi-faceted change programme across both the Service and Bureau. There has been a continued consolidation of common functions between the two agencies, and for NZSIS, a significant reduction in leadership positions. While the details of our workforce structure and capability are kept secret for good reason, I can confirm that this change programme has not resulted in any reduction in overall staffing levels and has preserved our operational capabilities.
In summary, we are seeing a continued deterioration in the overall threat environment – it is certainly one of the most challenging periods I have seen during my nine years in the Intelligence Community. We have a talented and driven group of intelligence professionals working extremely hard for New Zealand to detect unknown threats as well as seeking to deter and disrupt the threats we do know about. Public engagement to raise awareness of threats and to share protective security advice has become a central feature of the work of the NZSIS. Our engagement, and the transparency that goes with it will continue to be important as we develop new capabilities in response to the complex and fast evolving threats New Zealand faces. Such capabilities include the ability to analyse large data sets to find unknown threats, the safe use of AI, and exploring what an expanded effects mandate for the Service might involve. This would not only be to detect but also disrupt certain types of threats.
Overall, we continue to refocus the agency to respond to the increasingly challenging threats New Zealand faces in a financially sustainable way, although noting that cost pressures still remain in the medium term.
Thank you, I will now pass on to Andrew Clark.