Dirty pool

Thanks to Newshub, we now know that the government-owned insurer Southern Response had private investigators snooping around after earthquake insurance claimants.

There are potential non-horrible explanations for some of this kind of thing. I was surprised that there weren't violent incidents involving severely aggrieved insurance claimants who had been treated very badly by EQC. If an insurer had received threats, it would have not been remiss in passing those along to police - and hiring some additional help wouldn't seem amiss.

And if an insurer thought that a claimant were doing something dodgy with respect to a claim, it's good to try to knock out insurance fraud.

But this smells more like attempts to silence critics by a state-owned entity.

RNZ adds more detail.

I'll look forward to seeing what the State Services Commissioner finds out.