Good riddance

After a flailing performance in the House on Wednesday, Clare Curran avoided having to answer further parliamentary questions about her use of a private email account to evade the OIA by the simple expedient of refusing to turn up for work. And now she's done the obvious and resigned entirely.

Good riddance. Curran was a disaster as a Minister, a secretive, incompetent control freak who seemed to go out of her way to make herself look suspicious. Lying to Parliament once about a secret meeting with a potential appointee could perhaps be excused as a mistake; doing it twice makes it a clear pattern of behaviour. But I guess that's what you get from pyramid-climbing party hacks.

The bad news is that Curran's obligations under the OIA ended the moment she resigned, and all of the government emails in her private Gmail account are no longer "held" and can therefore not be requested. Which insofar as they are government information, is outrageous, a theft from the public. It exposes a hole in our transparency regime which needs to be plugged.