More on Curran

Some further thoughts.

First is that there is absolutely no suggestion Curran herself did anything wrong.  It is not her fault that Parker and the Ministry stuffed things up.

The second is how the report seems to have reached it conclusions at the beginning and then gone through and tried to explain away all the evidence that doesn’t fit the conclusion.

I mean there were written memos describing her as a Ministerial appointee.  Almost all the comms staff saw her as such.  The Minister’s Office described her as his right hand woman and set up job interview meetings for her.

Now the report explains away each of these circumstances on an individual basis, but what the report didn’t and probably couldn’t do is ask how likely it is that all these people had the wrong end of the stick  as opposed to the right end. It didn’t look at two scenarios and consider which was more likely.