Very bad things

Earlier this week, Judith Collins announced that the Government would be "concluding" the coordinated response to the Christchurch terror attacks, leaving 8 of the 44 recommendations made by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attacks on the Christchurch mosques unimplemented.

If you are a maths genius then you might feel compelled to point out that 36 out of 44 isn't a bad number (also, Christopher Luxon sends you a big high five because maths is super important). But this would completely ignore that Royal Commissions of Inquiry aren't set up every day, and their recommendations aren't a Christmas wishlist that you should feel free to pick and choose from. A Royal Commission of Inquiry usually happens when something has gone very, very wrong and it's in the best interests of the country to find out how it went very, very wrong so that we can figure out ways not to have things go very, very wrong again. Think Erebus. Think Pike River. Think abuse in state care. Significant, disastrous events with ongoing effects on the people of this country.

Foremost among the dropped recommendations was an ongoing discussion about restorative justice with the witnesses, survivors and whānau of those killed. That our government just noped out of that on its own is reason enough to be furious. Other dropped recommendations included establishing an advisory group on counter-terrorism (one that presumably could cope with the notion that members of the Muslim community might be victims rather than perpetrators), and mandatory reporting of firearms injuries to police by health professionals (how is that not already a thing?). The full list is in the article linked at the top of this post.

But this is all okay because Judith Collins said so - "Our commitment remains the same: to ensure a safe and secure country for all our communities."

I mean, she may as well offer us all "thoughts and prayers".

I wouldn't blame the people directly affected by the horrific events of that day for feeling like they'd been fobbed off, because they basically have been. We now know what the shelf-life is for sympathies - five years, give or take. Time to move on.

I'm not sure it's that easy. Five years on, I think about that day fairly often. I walk past the former site of the Linwood Islamic Centre most days. The unimposing wooden hall that functioned as a place of worship was demolished a while back to make way for a new, as yet unstarted, complex. It's just another vacant lot behind a metal fence at the moment. I hope it springs to life again and new, better memories are made there but the old ones do have a habit of sticking around.

I know that new memories are possible because I live in Christchurch and my city is now a psychic palimpsest of rebirth on top of horror on top of cosy familiarity - there are a multitude of sites that live in my head as places of death, but also the place that made the good chicken and cheese rolls, but also something new and different with its own associations.

If it sounds confusing, it is. And I didn't even lose a loved one. I am several steps removed from it. My scars are hair thin and basically invisible. But sure, the people who lived that horror are probably fine now. Sure. That sounds plausible. I don't really know where I'm going with this except: Is 36 out of 44 truly the best we could manage? Or are we failing our people, yet again?

Anyway, if you would like to donate some of your tax cut to the Muslim Association of Canterbury details of how to do that are on their website.