KEY POINTS:
Despite the heat being turned up on Damien O'Connor this week as never before, his resignation from the Corrections portfolio was never really on the cards.
If O'Connor was ever going to go, that time was last December after a thorough investigation by the inspector of corrections into the circumstances surrounding the murder of 17-year-old Liam Ashley found that practices in transporting prisoners to court hearings were deficient.
O'Connor kept his job in part because National held back for fear of being accused of playing politics with someone's death, in part because the inspector's report was submerged in the pre-Christmas rush, in part because there was little public pressure for a resignation, but mainly because Prime Minister Helen Clark made a judgment call that while O'Connor was responsible he was not to blame. Likewise Barry Matthews, the chief executive of Corrections.
O'Connor kept his job in March despite a Corrections Department report revealing serious lapses in departmental checks on whether Graeme Burton was abiding by his parole conditions in the time before he killed Karl Kuchenbecker in the Wellington hills.
Those investigations dealt literally with matters of life and death. If O'Connor could survive all that, the Beehive probably assumed the minister could survive anything that Chief Ombudsman John Belgrave's wider inquiry into prisoner transport might throw up.
If so, it was a miscalculation. If anything, Belgrave's report was worse news for O'Connor than the preceding Ashley and Burton investigations.It was more difficult for political opponents to pin accountability for the killings on O'Connor when the lapses in procedures occurred at the lower levels of the Corrections Department.
Belgrave's report has brought things much closer to home in terms of ministerial responsibility by virtue of being one of the most damning that a Government department must have ever received.
Both Belgrave and Ombudsman Mel Smith, who assisted Belgrave, are former senior public servants of vast experience and standing. They are not prone to hyperbole. When they use the word "unsatisfactory" - as they do throughout their report - they are saying things are bad.
The report has fundamentally altered what Sir Geoffrey Palmer has described as the "complicated political cost-benefit equation" which determines whether a minister should be sacked for inadequate performance.
Notably, the public pressure on O'Connor and Matthews to quit has intensified markedly. It has not been enough to tip the balance. But it could the next time disaster strikes in the portfolio.
Regardless, a change of personnel in the portfolio - if it wasn't the case already - now seems inevitable when the Prime Minister undertakes her pre-election Cabinet reshuffle later this year or early next.
Coming on top of Labour's slump in the polls, the fallout from the Belgrave report is further reason to bring that reshuffle forward.
All along, O'Connor has taken the view that the concept of individual ministerial responsibility entails staying in the job to fix the problems rather than resigning and delivering a hospital pass to his successor in the portfolio.
Yet however hard O'Connor labours - and he is understood to be hugely frustrated by the resistance to change within Corrections - he now has an added difficulty in convincing the public that the department's deep-seated problems are being remedied.
O'Connor's repeated assurances that things will improve have to compete with the Chief Ombudsman in effect saying that has not been the case to date.
To his credit, O'Connor unflinchingly fronted in the media all week. He never ducked for cover.
But the upshot was his being subject to two days of intense and unrelenting media coverage, little of which was ever going to be positive.
One view within the Beehive holds that O'Connor has tied himself - and thus Labour - too closely to his department. Colleagues have advised him to establish some distance.
He is incurably loyal, however. In an interview with the Herald he twice refused to say whether he felt let down by his department. While he talked forthrightly of senior managers being "on notice", when quizzed by Parliament's law and order committee he explained that meant he and Corrections staff were on notice to do the very best job that they could. Clark, in contrast, would have had no hesitation gunning for Corrections following the Belgrave report. But she was in Australia all week. In her absence, Labour seemed bereft of a really effective damage-control strategy to counter Belgrave's report.
True, O'Connor tried to pre-empt it by announcing that the Government planned to use waist-restraints in prison vans to stop any fighting.
He also sought to belittle the report by highlighting its comments about prisoners having access to emergency exit hatches in the event of an accident. In fact, the report merely recommended that a policy be formulated on whether prisoners should be able to operate emergency exit hatches.
With Chubb Security declaring it wants out of the business of prisoner escort, O'Connor also made it pretty clear the Government would bring this back in-house rather than continue to contract it to the private sector. He obviously hoped the media would go with this angle.
However, none of this overshadowed the report's most damaging findings - a lack of communication between the department's head office and frontline staff; Chubb's unanswered concerns that prisoners locked in "cages" in the back of vans could not communicate with prison staff sitting in the cabs; and, most serious of all, the suggestion that Corrections misled the Ombudsman in saying it was meeting minimum standards for ventilating and controlling the temperatures in prison vans when in fact it was not able to do so.
The Chief Ombudsman is an officer of Parliament. The House would be obliged to respond to any attempt to frustrate his investigatory role, even more so when a Government department is involved.
O'Connor managed to defuse that potential timebomb by referring the matter to State Services Commissioner Mark Prebble, who was subsequently told by Belgrave and Smith that they had not meant to imply they had been misled.
It was two days too late, however. Just like the assistance O'Connor was finally given by Cabinet colleagues in Parliament on Thursday to deflect the barrage of questions from Simon Power, National's corrections spokesman, whose swift dissection of the Belgrave report's findings had O'Connor on the back foot within minutes of its release on Tuesday afternoon.
Unfortunately for O'Connor, the mess at Corrections makes him a walking advertisement for many of the things which are turning voters off Labour in such proportions.
Lagging so badly in the polls, it is the last such image Labour should be projecting right now.
