Editorial: Sydney siege - too many experts, not enough info

Armed tactical response officers outside the building. AP

Monday 4pm: As I'm writing this the Sydney siege is taking place.

Thanks to the power of social media, combined with the added weight of traditional and digital media, we are exposed to more information about this unfolding crisis than you could have imagined just a few short years ago.

But still we know so little.

Disgustingly, many are using this crisis as a chance to push their own barrows.

The Right says the Sydney hostage situation is justification for tighter terror laws. The Left says this event has come about as a consequence of tensions inflamed by anti-terror laws.

All this within an hour or two of breaking news of the drama.

Both sides are as bad as each other. (And even worse are the idiotic conspiracy theorists whose views don't deserve repeating).

The fact is, at this point no one knows the motivations of the perpetrator, or perpetrators.

What we do know is that in this part of the world, this doesn't happen every day.

That a key part of a city where thousands of Kiwis live, including many Rotorua people, is in lockdown as authorities respond to a threat they still don't know the scale of.

And we know that dozens of families right now don't care why their loved ones are being held hostage or whether the writing on the black flag displayed in the cafe is described as Arabic or Islamic or if it is linked to a Syrian terror group, they don't care that a taxi service ramped up its charges during the lockdown and train stoppage, they don't care that someone tweeted something thoughtless about the cafe's social media strategy - those families just want their loved ones home safe.