Hysteria

Stuff reports:

Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee is demanding answers after EQC’s “unprecedented” privacy blunder while his Labour counterpart has called for his resignation.

Brownlee said last night he would meet EQC chief executive Ian Simpson and chairman Michael Wintringham this morning to insist on answers.

Brownlee, who found out about the 73,000 extra claimants only at 2.21pm yesterday (the media conference was at 3pm), said the blunder was embarrassing and he had a “lot more to find out”.

“On Friday when we first learned there had been a mishap, it was in the realms of being a forgivable mistake but when you learn that rather than 9700 claims affected it’s more than 80,000, well, that escalates it a little bit further to say the least.” …

Labour earthquake spokeswoman Lianne Dalziel said Brownlee needed to “make an appointment with the Prime Minister and hand in his resignation notice”.

A staff member didn’t notice that his auto-complete function had inserted the wrong recipient name, and sent an attachment to the wrong person.

And Dalziel thinks this is a case for the Minister to resign.

All I can say is that Labour will need a very large caucus if they get into Government, because I expect Ministers will be resigning every week or so based on this new hysterical standard.