John Armstrong: Minister down but not out by any shot

The "crusher" crushed? Well, for the time being at least.

But don't expect Judith Collins to take defeat sitting down. Though the Corrections Minister may have been comprehensively wiped in her battle to have her department's chief executive Barry Matthews removed from his position, he would be fooling himself if he thinks he has won the war.

Who wouldn't have wanted to be a fly on the wall at yesterday morning's meeting between the pair. The temperature in the room must have been several degrees below that of a morgue and the conversation just as convivial.

She said later that she had told him exactly what she was telling the media. If so, she would have served notice on him that he would not have her confidence until he had rebuilt public confidence in the department. She would have dropped a strong hint that requires a clean-out in the department's senior management which has been seen as an obstacle to the "culture change" she is seeking in the way the department operates.

She is not the first minister to demand that. Labour's Damien O'Connor pleaded with Matthews to do it. Unlike O'Connor, Collins is not going to allow herself to become a victim of the department's failings.

She has had to back off for now. The contents of the report from State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie, which found Matthews was not to blame for the huge lapses in the monitoring of offenders on parole uncovered by Auditor-General Kevin Brady, were exactly the opposite to what Collins was punting on getting.

She asked Rennie to find out who was accountable for those lapses. If she made a mistake, it was to expect that the commissioner would single out someone. Instead - and no doubt to her horror - the report is almost glowing in terms of Matthews' performance in the face of staff shortages, lack of experienced staff and the added workload imposed by the last Government's move to more community-based sentencing.

Reading Rennie's report, you have to remind yourself that Brady found that in most of the 100 parole case files his staff examined - and that included 52 high-risk offenders - the department had not followed its own self-imposed requirements which had been tightened following parolee Graeme Burton's killing of Karl Kuchenbecker. In other words, there were plenty more accidents like that waiting to happen.

Collins' error was to underestimate the State Services Commissioner's traditional capacity for bending over backwards to avoid confrontation. Indeed, the commissioner sees himself as some kind of marriage-guidance counsellor when it comes to dealing with fractional relations between ministers and their chief executives.

Faced with a report which found no one accountable in terms worthy of justifying dismissal, Collins was stymied. She could have told Rennie she simply could no longer work with Matthews full stop. The commissioner would have been forced to remove him.

But that would have left him sitting out the remaining two years of his contract on gardening leave while picking up more than $700,000-plus in salary in the process. There had been some talk that if the report absolved Matthews, she would put the commissioner on notice that next time there was a tragedy due to Corrections' failure of procedure, Rennie too would be accountable.

However, that would have been seen as her expressing that she - and therefore the Government - no longer had confidence in Rennie.

Collins' problems with Matthews are one thing. Declaring war on Rennie, the referee between ministers and departments, is something else completely.