Andrew Little, the minister coordinating the response to the Royal Commission report into the Christchurch mosque attacks, has promised the Muslim community to engage in a collaborative effort - but would not commit to any compensation.
"We acknowledge today would be a hard day ... this is about re-living some of the horror of 15 March," he told Checkpoint, and thanked the Muslim community for its patience and input into the report.
He made a "promise that we will engage in collaborative effort".
Little said the commission report talked about "the way we have formed our strategic decisions around national security, we had let a lot of things go, there wasn't a lot of concentrated strategic leadership."
He said intelligence agencies should have been looking at a broader range of threats.
Since the early 2000s, they had geared up and responded to "threats that were evident around the world and for New Zealand" but they were not further developed to include white supremacists and other terrorist threats.
A strategic review of the GCSB and NZSIS in 2016-17 found the need to beef up their capability, he said.
"In 2018 they started looking at other forms of extremist terrorism."
Read more:
- PM, police, security agencies apologise over mosque shootings
- Families 'let down' by agencies in aftermath
- Christchurch terrorist originally planned attack for August - report
- 'We should have been safe here' - mosque leaders
He would not confirm if the survivors and families of victims would get compensated. Instead, he said government agencies like MSD, ACC and Immigration would work to support them.
"In terms of issues of compensation, I'm not thinking of that at the moment."
For now, Little said he was focused on the recommendations in the report.
"We need to do better when it comes to the range of ethnic minorities in this country being represented in those frontline agencies."
However, he did not see the need for personnel changes in those agencies.
He said he felt a responsibility to make sure the government agencies who were responsible for providing support to victims who felt let down by the processes in the aftermath of the attacks, in ensuring those agencies provided the support they needed to.
There would be an opportunity during the coroner's inquest to raise those people's concerns with the coronial processes, he said.
