Kiwiblog

The State Services Commission has said it is not sacking Corrections CEO Barry Matthews. The Dom Post reports:

Corrections boss Barry Matthews’ job appears safe after the State Services Commissioner found he was not to blame for major failings in the management of parole.

Commissioner Iain Rennie said that after assessing the department’s performance following a damning Audit Office report into parole, it would not be justified to dismiss Mr Matthews.

“While the levels of non-compliance are higher than either the department or Auditor General desire, there is substantial evidence of a significant improvement in compliance over 2008 and a consistent and energetic focus on compliance issues by the chief executives and the managers of [probation services].”

In other words the peformance has been bad, but improving.

I suggest it would be a very good thing if it keeps improving. If it does not, I suspect the Minister will re-ask the SSC the question.

Anthony Hubbard in the SST predicts some axes tomorrow:

ACC MINISTER Nick Smith is likely to sack ACC chairman Ross Wilson and several other board members tomorrow.

And embattled Corrections Department chief executive Barry Matthews is likely to be soon removed from his post by the State Services Commission.

We’ll find out tomorrow if that is correct or not!

Almost every major newspaper has now called for Barry Matthews to do the decent thing and resign. The latest is the Sunday Star-Times:

LET’S CONCEDE that Barry Matthews has a tough job. His department must look after the human wreckage that society has spurned: the lost, the vicious, the drunk and the addicted, the hopeless and the bent and twisted.

Absolutely. Corrections is as tough as it gets.

Let’s also concede that Corrections, for deep historical reasons, is not well placed to cope. The tough criminal culture has produced a tough culture among the guards. Attempts to change this culture are difficult and take time. One reason for the enthusiastic move to try private prisons all those years ago was the feeling that the state prison system was unreformable: a fresh start was needed.

And Labour’s killing off of this initiative is one of the most ideological stupid things they did. The state prison system does have a culture of corruption (the SST calls it “tough”, and this was a chance to help turn that around.

Does all this mean that Matthews should keep his job? No. The Auditor-General’s report is, in truth, a damning one and there can be no excuses for the trouble it uncovered. A year-long audit showed that despite the department’s spectacular failures in the case of murderers William Bell and Graeme Burton, Corrections continued to fail to do its job. This was not a case simply of not enough workers to carry out the tasks. It was just plain negligence and sloppiness. Dangerous prisoners walked free and no attempt was made to warn their victims. Others went out into the world and did not see a probation officer for weeks or months.

The public, in other words, was at risk because the department wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. Matthews, as the chief executive of the department, must be accountable for these failings. He has been in charge for four years. That is long enough to ensure that those who work in the organisation do the job they are paid to do. These were not isolated shortcomings. They were frequent or systemic.

Traditionally, we have demanded accountability either from the minister or the chief executive of a department; too often, both have declined to accept the blame. Judith Collins has the great good luck to be a new minister, and cannot fairly be blamed. The buck stops, therefore, with Matthews. No doubt he has done his best. No doubt he has worked hard to reform an intractable organisation that has had to bear impossible new loads. But in the end, the democratic system requires accountability. If Matthews will not resign, the State Services Commission must move or sack him.

The Herald editorial is to the point:

From the moment on Tuesday that the Auditor General delivered a report on the administration of parole, it has been obvious that the head of the Corrections Department must resign. Obvious, it seems, to everyone but him. Barry Matthews’ stated determination to stay at his post is untenable.

It does him no credit to insist he is staying to put things right. If he was capable of doing that he surely would have done so after the murder committed by a parolee, Graeme Burton, two years ago. That was not the first time the monitoring of parole has let the country down; it was just the last straw.

It is obvious he has had his chances and failed. But our employment law doesn’t allow you to sack a CEO just because they have failed at their job. The SSC will have to be careful.

If a departmental head does not know how to do the decent thing in these circumstances, public service standards are at a low ebb. The State Services Commission should not take any more of the 10 days given it to find who is responsible. It knows where the buck stops. So does Mr Matthews. He must go.

A very strong editorial that Matthews should reflect on.

The Auditor General’s report into how the Corrections Department manages parole is a shocker:

My staff looked at how the Department managed offenders released on parole. We chose 100 offender case files in the four areas we visited to assess whether probation officers and other staff were managing offenders in keeping with the Department’s requirements. We deliberately included 52 offenders considered to pose a high risk to the public.

In most of those 100 case files, the Department had not followed one or more of its own sentence management requirements. Five of the requirements that my staff checked are the most important, in my view, for keeping the public safe, and one or more of these five requirements had not been followed in most of the 100 cases. There were several cases, some of which I have included in my report, where the Department had not completed important sentence management requirements at each stage of an offender’s parole, and we concluded that the Department was not managing these cases adequately.

They are damning words, coming from the Auditor-General. Equally damning was the response of Minister Judith Collins:

Corrections Minister Judith Collins today asked the State Services Commissioner to establish who is accountable for serious failings identified by the Auditor-General’s report into the management of offenders on parole. …

“I have today asked the State Services Commissioner to work with Corrections Chief Executive Barry Matthews to establish who is accountable for the deficiencies identified in the report and what should be done to restore public confidence.”

Ms Collins has asked the Commissioner to report back within 10 working days.

This is about as subtle as John Cleese. I mean you do not need to run a competition to guess who the State Services Commissioner will find is responsible for management failings in the Department. This must qualify as the most unsubtle ever request to SSC to remove a CEO. But not wihout considerable merit – the OAG report is damning, and the mistakes in this area do and have cost lives.

The Herald reports that Corrections CEO faces the axe:

Barry Matthews’ future as head of Corrections is in serious question, after his Minister Judith Collins pointedly refused to express confidence in him yesterday. …

Ms Collins would say only: “I have confidence Mr Matthews understands exactly just how seriously I am viewing this issue.”

Again, you don’t exactly need a PhD in Politics to read between the lines here.

John Armstrong comments:

Wielding a calculated, but ruthless combination of raw power and tactical guile, Corrections Minister Judith “Crusher” Collins has torn up the public service rulebook and effectively engineered the sacking of her departmental chief executive.

Technically, she cannot fire Barry Matthews, the long-suffering head of the problem-plagued Corrections Department. But “technically” is not a word in this Collins’ dictionary.

Indeed.

But regardless of this, Matthews’ resignation letter should have been on the desk of State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie yesterday, so damning was the Auditor-General’s report on Corrections’ management of its parole responsibilities. …

The report shows the department failing to follow its own procedures in monitoring potentially dangerous prisoners on parole – procedures tightened after the murder of Lower Hutt father-of-two Karl Kuchenbecker by Graeme Burton in January 2007.

This is the scary thing. The audit was done after the Burton fiasco, and was meant to measure the new improved processes in place.