Enhancing Government Relations through Public Engagement: A Case of Christchurch Mosque Attacks

To the world, New Zealand has always been conceived as a safe and peaceful country, however has
pronounced its two sequential massive terrorism attacks of mosque shooting in Christchurch, during
Friday prayer, on March 15th, 2019. The attack started at the Al Noor Mosque at 1:40pm which
followed by the second attempt at the Linwood Islamic Centre 15 minutes subsequently. A 28-yearold Australian-citizen gunman has live streamed the attack via his Facebook account – the tragedy
has claimed the lives of 51 and injured 49 others. Evidently, numbers of politicians and world leaders
criticized the attacks, and as the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern in her standing
ovation at Christchurch Memorial deemed saying that the attack witnessed as ‘one of New Zealand
darkest days’ and ‘the role of combatting terrorism attacks, condemnation of violence turn now to a
collective response, not the government alone’. This paper aims to emphasizes on the conceptual and
practical understanding on the concept of collective response through public engagement – it is fairly
a new term and practice that comprises of various ways to assemble people together as a mean of
putting the public concerns forward. In this context of crisis, the government has constantly
encouraged open communication with the citizens, the affected family members, in particular, by
involving interaction, and listening. With the goal of generating mutual resolution, these efforts are
considered as a compliment to a practicing democratic country as direct involvement of ordinary
people in a crisis resolution is significantly noticeable. The main contribution of this paper lies at the
government efforts at repairing the damage and securing the well-being of nations. This paper
approaches literature review as a research methodology by putting the perspectives on government
relations alongside with public engagement as a mean of enhancing understanding on how these two
entities reciprocate each other, at times. For future research, the emphasis of analysis can be given
onto the roles of media at reporting the government efforts at combatting such social or racial crisis.