Spare Room Be our guest…

By Kirk MacGibbon

I’m suffering from a sense of acute déjà vu. It’s looking very much as if Barry Matthews, who has been running the Corrections Service is going to be ‘Rankin’d’.

Dear old Barry, he looks like a classic ‘risen through the ranks’ kind of guy (I’ll report back on whether my completely subjective assessment of him bears any resemblance to reality somewhere in the course of this blog, after I’ve googled him), but one gets the distinct feeling that he’s going to be in for a rough time.

Which is why I’m so amused by media reports heralding National’s ‘new era of accountability’. I mean, does no-one remember 1999 and Labour’s persecution of Christine Rankin – the West Coast solo mother who rose to head up the old ‘WINZ’, and made the fatal mistake of daring to have fun – and of course frightening Mark Prebble with her breasts…

In 1999, Clark unleashed Trevor Mallard on the public service to root out “excesses” and ensure that “no culture of extravagance sets in in that area”. Social Welfare Minister Steve Maharey gleefully crucified Rankin and all but launched a jihad against her. No; on reflection, it was a jihad.

Judith Collins, to give her some credit, is trying it seems to emulate that tactic and is being assisted by a natural ‘don’t f#@k with me’ demeanour, but old Barry seems more than up to the task. Faced with Collins’ eerily Thatcherite countenance, he blithely stated that he was ‘not looking for a job’ and fully intended to serve out his remaining two years. Beautiful.

Yikes, I’ve now done a bit of research on Matthews and I have to say that I don‘t give Collins a chance in hell of getting his scalp without a politically damaging golden handshake. He’s ex-Police – a ‘cop’s cop’ apparently, and was in charge of the disastrous INCIS project. No, he’s a survivor all right.

I have to say though, that I have never liked it when politicians turn on their servants. It smacks of bullying. The target has little recourse to any sort of rebuttal and rapidly becomes the flogging horse for all public service ills. Back in 1999 politicians and the media were ‘outraged’ at Rankin’s $250k+ salary. Although there was always a nastier undercurrent to the whole Rankin affair – that she had somehow risen above her station.

Certainly in more recent times no-one got too outraged about Ministry of Social Development CEO Peter Hughes’ $500k+ salary, and I haven’t heard much ‘outrage’ this time around over Matthew’s $370k salary. Maybe our constant recent exposure to Wall Street banking executives’ remuneration has inured us to any salary that doesn’t feature at least seven digits…

The other reason I don’t like this persecution of Matthews is for the simple fact that he is trying to run the Corrections Service. If anyone should be resigning over the lapses at Corrections it should probably have been Corrections Minister Phil Goff. Or before him, Damien O’Connor who should definitely have resigned over the systemic failures that happened under his watch.

As Goff proudly stated just last year in a question to then Opposition Justice spokesman Simon Power: “Department of Corrections has coped with 3,200 net additional inmates since 1999, a 71 percent rise because of the enactment of tougher laws and the provision of more police.” One can bet with some certainty that its $760 million operating budget has not risen at the same rate.

An interesting issue raised as a corollary was the discovery of a $5 million meth ring being run from behind bars and the fact that in seven years, cell phone blocking technology had only been introduced in four prisons. There are 20 in total and Goff proclaimed that by February 2009 the technology would be in all prisons. Someone should follow up on that.

Let’s face it, Matthews is running a service that would not exactly feature highly in the career plans of our best and brightest talent. And they have to deal with ‘customers’ (clients?) who are most certainly not our best and brightest either, thank god. The only time we ever actually give a rats about what happens in Corrections is when an escape or random act of violence lifts the lid on the ‘nasty, brutish and [often] short” netherworld in which the system operates. I’d say, without any knowledge of the facts (but since when did that stop anyone from forming a view?) that Matthews has probably done a bloody fantastic job in keeping the whole creaking edifice functioning at all.

The gulag archipelago that Matthews presides over seems to this writer to have coped extremely well with society’s seemingly unquenchable thirst not simply for justice, but increasingly for retribution. Non-parole periods seem to be being imposed far more frequently than they used to and we keep forcing more and more people into the sewer. Our rate of imprisonment stands at around 185 per 100,000. Almost the highest in the Western world. And when you get a complete nutter like Antonie Dixon opting for suicide rather than continuing to live in it, you start getting an inkling of what Corrections staff are having to deal with.

With the Prime Minister’s proud unveiling of his boot camp initiative, for the worst young offenders we have yet another shining example of the triumph of form over substance. We don’t really care if it works or not, or has been tried and failed before (I’m at a loss as to why one would even consider exposing a potentially psychopathic young thug to anything military. I think it’s best for all concerned that they stay lazy and undisciplined). But as long as we can feel that ‘something is being done’, it seems we don’t really care. It’s the old ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ mentality that Key and his generation grew up with, and has surely contributed at least partly to today’s legacy of appalling child abuse statistics.

So I say, we need people like Matthews. Collins’ may well want to consider that it is public servants like him that give politicians the opportunity to grandstand and implement pet projects without having to pony up with the cash to do things properly.

Read more posts by The Outlaw:
Of History and Relevance
Humpty Dumpty and putting things back together again
Where’s Our Government?
Of Honeymoons and Little Men