Jim Hopkins: A world of inquiries creates only a desire to survive

The first instinct is to ignore this week. It's been unspeakable. And shameful.

The things that have happened in the past seven days force upon us the awful realisation that it is safer for a New Zealander to be held hostage in Palestine than it is to be left in the custody of our own Corrections Department in Auckland.

That is the fact of the matter - and two families know it.

Olaf Wiig is alive. Liam Ashley is not.

Olaf Wiig was either the prisoner of blackmailers posing as extremists, in which case his captors are now gleefully banking Rupert Murdoch's cheque, or he was the prisoner of extremists manifesting their extremism, in which case, for some inexplicable reason, they stopped short of murder on this occasion.

Whichever it was, he is alive.

But Liam Ashley is dead.

Placed in the care of the New Zealand Government, he was buried on Wednesday. No amount of inquiries or wringing of hands will change that immutable fact.

Yet inquiries are what we will have. Many of them. Several are already under way. Chubb Security, the firm contracted to transport prisoners is holding an inquiry. The Corrections Department that contracted Chubb Security to transport prisoners is holding an inquiry.

The Ombudsman is holding an inquiry. It seems everyone with breath in their bodies is holding an inquiry.

And they are all absolutely unnecessary.

There is no mystery here, no enigma that requires decoding; nothing that justifies wasting time and money. Every one of these inquiries is a blatant example of the unnecessary in pursuit of the self-evident.

What happened in this case is clear. Incompetence or negligence put Liam Ashley in harm's way; it was bad rules or bad practices. Nothing else.

It wasn't tough love.

And it wasn't his parents' decision to involve the police. Their grief is surely unimaginable but their innocence is absolute.

Responsibility here rests exclusively with a killer (as yet unknown) and with the state whose agencies facilitated this foul act.

By commission or omission, they are accessories to the fact.

In a country proud of its democratic traditions, in a country where it is accepted that the privilege of power brings with it some onerous responsibilities, that fact would have already been accepted.

Chubb would have already suspended the employees in the van.

The head of the Corrections Department would have already resigned.

The Minister of Corrections would have already resigned. And the Prime Minister would have already accepted his resignation.

Not because they were in the vehicle. Not because they sanctioned a murder.

But because they didn't sanction it and because it should never ever have happened and because the measure of a failure so absolute must be more than the hollow pieties of the powerful.

"Procedures will have to be looked at" is a lame and feeble response to something as terrible as this. It's not enough for those with power to say it is "unacceptable for a minor to be murdered" in a prison van.

"Unacceptable" is a bland and tepid word. It may apply to MPs who accept ex-gratia payments for doing their job - although there are many other terms that would do as well.

It may apply if representatives of Parliamentary Services feel compelled to put up signs in an electorate office advising all who visit the premises seeking aid that they do not have to pay for such assistance, aid and succour as they receive. It may be the correct term if an MP were proven to have ordered one of his employees to share her pay with his missus.

"Unacceptable" is a word you might pluck from the mental ether should you wish to describe a politician's convenient lapses of memory when asked to testify before a toothless inquiry or the news that taxpayers may get the bill for a party's election campaign.

You may even have recourse to it when explaining the conduct of those diligent bureaucrats who've rather carelessly misplaced 800 Zimbabwean refugees - including an unknown number with Aids - and then proposed allowing them to remain at large until February in order that they can share the many benefits of their affliction with others in this country.

But "unacceptable" won't suffice when the state's failure to do its job properly results in somebody's violent murder.

Particularly so when the description is tendered by those ultimately responsible for the state's failure.

And when they will not even acknowledge that the consequences of that failure must ultimately rest with them.

It used to be monarchs who abdicated. Now it's MPs.

But what they abdicate is responsibility.

There is no honour in the world of inquiries, just an overweaning desire to survive at all costs.

We seem indifferent now to the increasingly desperate attempts of the powerful to exonerate or distance themselves whenever something repulsive or dreadful occurs.

It hasn't occurred to anyone this week - certainly not anyone in power - that the murder of a child in the care of his own Government is something so heinous that a public act of contrition is absolutely essential.

The hard-won and often bloody gift of democracy evidently places no such obligation on its current custodians. Inasmuch as they have chosen to dishonour the tradition whose privileges they enjoy, they should feel humiliated and ashamed.

And, inasmuch as the rest of us have tolerated this culture of evasion and abdication, so should we.