KEY POINTS:
What to make of Damien O'Connor? What to make of a politician who responds to demands he apologise for the failings of his department by choosing not to reveal that he has in fact apologised.
For Mr O'Connor, the secrecy was a point of principle. The Corrections Minister
deemed his meeting with the family of Karl Kuchenbecker, who was killed by Graeme Burton while the latter was on parole, to be a private matter.
However, honourable intentions have sure made for bad politics in this case. The Corrections Minister could have saved himself and Labour a heap of political grief had he revealed far earlier that he apologised privately to the Kuchenbeckers.
The 90-minute meeting, which was sought by the minister, predated last week's reports into the granting and monitoring of Burton's parole. He expressed sorrow to the Kuchenbeckers for the loss of their son and gave a commitment to do everything in his power to prevent such a tragedy happening again.
Amazingly, after the reports were released, Mr O'Connor then sat through subsequent media interviews and this week's snap debate in Parliament, being pilloried all along for failing to do the decent thing when in fact he had. But he said nothing.
As much as can be deduced, he believed that mentioning the private apology would somehow devalue it. He did not want to make a private apology and then be accused of using it to get himself off a political hook.
His colleagues consider he took the harder option by meeting the Kuchenbecker family, when it would have been easier to have issued a public apology by means of press statement.
However, the absence of the latter and the secrecy surrounding the former perversely made Mr O'Connor appear insensitive and the Government indifferent to the fates of both Mr Kuchenbecker and North Shore teenager Liam Ashley, who was killed in the back of a prison van last year.
In the wake of National's continued onslaught on the Corrections portfolio, senior Labour figures yesterday judged the minister had stuck to his principles for long enough and he and the party had suffered enough.
But it was not Mr O'Connor who broke the silence. It was the Prime Minister who deliberately mentioned he had apologised while being questioned by National in Parliament.
It still begs the further question of a public apology. Mr O'Connor is not accountable solely to Burton's victims.
He is accountable to the wider public who need to have confidence that the failings of the parole system will be rectified. A public apology would be an indication that Labour is taking fixing things as seriously as it insists it is.
