The plague camp and "national security"

Stuff reported this morning that the ongoing plague camp outside Parliament has triggered a "national security crisis meeting":

Top-ranking government officials are holding a national security crisis meeting in response to the ongoing protest and blockade at Parliament.

Government officials that make up ODESC (Officials' Committee for Domestic and External Security Coordination) will meet on Thursday to discuss the protest and government response, in an effort to make sure “all risks and potential implications” of the protest are understood.

ODESC is headed by government chief executives and is the primary committee of the National Security System, which swings into action during crises that threaten New Zealand’s security, sovereignty or economy.

"The protest is a national security issue" sounds impressive and scary, but this is unlikely to actually be about the far-right aspects of the protest. According to the government National Security System handbook, "New Zealand takes an 'all hazards – all risks' approach to national security", looking at issues beyond traditional security threats. So instead of just focusing on war and terrorism, our national security infrastructure is also supposed to worry about things like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, hurricanes, and pandemics. You can see the breadth of this in the list of issues ODESC met on in 2017: plant diseases, infrastructure failures, bad weather and earthquakes, as well as "cyber" and traditional security threats. They meet over bad weather; of course they're going to meet over a three-month long traffic jam affecting one of our major cities. The far-right and Kelvyn Alp's fantasies about overthrowing our democracy are likely to get a couple of bullet points (more if the threat is assessed as serious), but the major focus is likely to be the prospect of sustained disruption to Wellingtonians' lives and how to manage and mitigate that.

(It is likely ODESC also met in the last week over Cyclone Dovi and Ukraine, not to mention the pandemic. Its a regular thing, not some mysterious super-secret only for massive crises group).

Unfortunately this "all hazards - all risks" approach is not matched in government budgets, which consistently massively overallocate resources to agencies focused on dealing with traditional threats - NZDF, SIS, GCSB etc - rather than to things which actually keep us safe (like civil defence and public health). And that's something we should fix sometime.