Illustration / Peter Bromhead
The security Jeremiahs will be most put out. Not one sword-wielding ninja, or explosive-belted suicide bomber, shattered the peace of Anzac Day commemorations. Anywhere.
The worst that happened was a few gang members revving their departing motor bike engines as the Last Post sounded at Waiouru. What a relief. The thought of the security prefects getting the upper hand and starting to rule our lives is too awful to contemplate.
Only the week before, Security Intelligence boss Rebecca Kitteridge had been talking up her business, claiming New Zealand was at increased risk of terror attacks following the despatch of troops to train their Iraqi counterparts.
Not to be outdone, Auckland University worrier about "extreme events" Dr Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor warned we were all "soft targets", whether sitting in an Albany cafe, the Sylvia Park food court, a Westgate supermarket or bungy-jumping off the harbour bridge.
In case that didn't scare us sufficiently, she tossed in "postcard targets" for terrorists such as the Aotea Centre and Vector Arena, adding, for good message, homes and workplaces around "landmarks" like the Sky Tower and Eden Park.
Just about everywhere, really.
Her answer. Bag checks on entering and leaving the malls, security screening at cinemas, more big brother spy cameras equipped with facial recognition software, and random identity card checking by police and security staff.
No doubt she means well, but to me, the cure sounds awfully like the disease she's trying to protect us from.
We would be surrendering a great handful of our civil liberties to protect us from some bogeyman who may, or may not, drop in from the Arab badlands.
It's a form of stranger-danger hysteria that periodically grips our remote little country. In the 1960s it was the commie hordes, flowing down through Asia, bent on our destruction.
Before that it was the Russkies, lurking just over the horizons for nigh on a quarter of a century, poised to invade Auckland. Even earlier, in 1854, Point Britomart was fortified against the French.
When Mt Tarawera erupted in 1886, destroying the famed pink and white terraces near Rotorua, worrywarts in Auckland heard the explosive booms, saw the flashes in the sky, and immediately imagined Russians blasting their way up Manukau Harbour.
Not everyone took it seriously. The Southern Cross newspaper in Auckland ran a hoax report in February 1873, about "the sudden appearance of the hostile iron-clad man-of-war, the Kaskowiski [get it?] which took possession of the British warship lying in the waters of the Waitemata, seized her principal citizens as hostages and demanded a heavy ransom for the city ... "
Not everyone was so frivolous. In 1878, the New Zealand Herald referred to the earlier "jocular hoax" by its rival, but warned "a hostile visit from a Russian man-of-war may by and by become a reality".
Torpedo Bay, home of the Navy Museum at Devonport, is a reminder of Aucklanders' fears. In 1885, Governor Sir William Jervois held public meetings to outline his defence plan against the Russians. He proposed gun batteries on both sides of the harbour entrance at North Head. If the invaders got through that gauntlet, the second line of defence was to be a daisy chain of explosive mines on the sea floor across the harbour entrance, to be triggered by new-fangled electricity from a bunker at Torpedo Bay.
Waiting in reserve was a "torpedo" boat, which if all else failed, would make a kamikaze run at the invader with an explosive charge on the end of a long wooden stick that would detonate on contact. Local volunteers were to confuse the warship by sailing out with the torpedo boat as decoys.
At great expense, the defences were purchased. Luckily the torpedo boats weren't put to the test. They were so narrow they would have capsized in anything but mill-pond conditions. As for the minefield, a line was run between the two shores and one mine was experimentally triggered, but the complete set was never installed.
But it wasn't all wasted money. The extensive lengths of wiring were eventually put to better use, as central Auckland's first telephone cabling.
A century later, the 2001 terror attack on the New York World Trade Centre prompted Auckland City Council to spend $122,000 on six more security guards for the Aotea Centre on a six-month trial. Wasted money? The security experts would say no, that you can't afford to be complacent.
Without more evidence the threat is real, to me, the price of their alternative seems too high.