Whole of Government/Interagency Approach

My challenge now is to provide you with tangible examples to illustrate how using a whole-of-government or close working interagency approach has benefited New Zealand in the maritime security environment.

I will start with the National Maritime Coordination Centre. Following a number of reviews and at government direction, it was established in 2003 with the aim of integrating the work of all agencies to ensure that there was a comprehensive national strategy for managing maritime risks.

It is an integral part of the New Zealand Customs Service but operates independently with staff comprising personnel seconded from Customs and Defence as well as liaison officers from Police and Fisheries. It is physically located within Headquarters Joint Force New Zealand, which not only provides operational benefits but also is very cost effective.

Using a risk management process, effects based tasking priorities are determined and in consultation with the asset owners, it coordinates the allocation of platforms to achieve effective and efficient outcomes.

As most of the assets that are provided are from Defence, the fact that it is colocated at the Operational HQ (and sits between the J3 and J2 areas) assists greatly in terms of liaison, planning and managing day-to-day multi-agency operations.

Spawned from the National Maritime Coordination Centre and developed by the New Zealand Defence Force, a good example of interagency cooperation has been the introduction of a Multi-Agency Network at the restricted level (MAN-R). Not so long ago each agency - such as the New Zealand Defence Force, Customs, Fisheries, Police - operated systems that provided secure communications within their own organisations but were unable to talk or pass operational data by secure means between the other government agencies.

The problem was exacerbated by the requirement for Fisheries and Customs to communicate with their people embarked in ships or aircraft. MAN-R is now deployed and is providing an effective command and control tool to support multiagency operations in the maritime environment. The next step will be to move it to a more highly classified domain.

New Zealand’s capability and capacity to conduct maritime patrol and response activities in our exclusive economic zone, the Southwest Pacific and the Southern Ocean has increased significantly with the introduction into service of the inshore and offshore patrol vessels that were purchased under the auspices of Project Protector.

The inshore patrol vessels have been operating successfully in New Zealand’s coastal waters for over two years now. They have done sterling work in support of many different agencies with tasking including resource protection, interdiction of potential drug trafficking vessels, counting marine life for the Department of Conservation, disaster relief response, and search and rescue.

Since their introduction into service, customs officers, as well as officers from other agencies, have regularly deployed in these vessels and many of the vessels operations are Customs based and supported through the National Maritime Coordination Centre. They not only work in concert with other New Zealand Defence Force platforms but also with Customs aerial surveillance and surface patrol assets.

Meanwhile the offshore patrol vessels have spent the past year or so conducting trials, working up and exploring their operating envelopes in the outer reaches of the exclusive economic zone, the Southwest Pacific, the deep Southern Ocean and the Ross Sea.

As I mentioned earlier, both the inshore and offshore vessels were delivered as part of the Project Protector package. This project provides a good example of the whole-of-government approach. From the early stages of the project, stakeholder agencies were involved to ensure that their capability requirements were included in the function and performance specification documentation and this involvement continued through the tender evaluation process.

Not all of the individual capability requirements were met; however, by being involved in the process and party to the trade-off discussions meant that the other agencies understood why certain decisions were taken and had a good feel for what the project would ultimately deliver.

While New Zealand’s maritime patrol capability and capacity has been significantly enhanced in recent times, the key enabler for the effective and efficient employment of maritime patrol assets is intelligence.

Sharing of information between government agencies in the past has been problematic largely due to the lack of a common data storage/retrieval system and the requirement to protect third party sources. This had certainly been the case with those agencies involved in border security.

Notwithstanding these constraints, the New Zealand Customs Service has taken the lead and established an Integrated Targeting and Operations Centre located at Customs House in Auckland.

The mission of the Integrated Targeting and Operations Centre is to support the command and coordination of border sector operations, across New Zealand’s layered border enforcement strategy. The agencies that are currently represented at it are: Customs, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Biosecurity, Immigration, Maritime New Zealand, and Police.

It is a 24/7 facility and is set up to facilitate different pieces of information and intelligence from different sources to be brought together in one place, allowing patterns to emerge under analysis and with the potential to improve the tactics we use to keep the border secure. There is still no common automated computer-based system of pooling information; however, by having representatives from the various agencies involved with border operations together in one place, this has appreciably enhanced New Zealand’s protection from a border control perspective.

The establishment of the Integrated Targeting and Operations Centre did come with some reputation and interagency relationship risk; however, it was a risk worth taking. It required agencies to work together on border security and its success has already been demonstrated in intercepting drugs and illegal immigrants at the border. The examples of interagency cooperation I have provided to this point have very much been at the tactical and operational level. I will now touch briefly on how security sector interagency arrangements are managed at the strategic level.

The role of the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security Coordination is to act on the Prime Minister’s behalf to exercise policy oversight of the New Zealand intelligence community and ensure that the agencies which constitute this community are efficient, effective, balanced and responsive in the performance of individual and collective responsibilities, and that they are geared to provide timely, relevant and useful intelligence and assessments on developments which are likely to affect New Zealand. It also maintains oversight of security within government departments and agencies and is responsible for setting standards or requirements for government departments and agencies to follow. The Committee provides advice and guidance on policy and operational matters relating to counter-terrorism and the management of terrorist incidents. From time to time, the Committee also provides advice to Cabinet or relevant sub-committee on external security matters where a coordinated interdepartmental stream of policy advice is appropriate.

Over the past 18 months in New Zealand there have been a number of events that have required a multi-agency response. These events include the two significant Christchurch earthquakes (4 September 2010 and 22 February 2011), the Pike River Mine disaster (November 2010), and the Rena grounding. In this list I would also include the considerable interagency planning and execution of the security arrangements for the New Zealand hosted Rugby World Cup in 2011.

The success to the multi-agency responses to these events has come about, in large part, by close interagency cooperation built on personal relationships that have developed at all levels in the various agencies including those in the wider security sector.

These personal relationships and a working knowledge of how each others’ agencies operate pay dividends: during planning and coordination meetings when priorities need to be set; during operations when there are competing demands for resources; and, especially when responding at the national level to unforeseen events.