"But David Seymour Said!" - Why Jacinda Ardern Was Right
A Response to The School Lunches Article Criticism
Yesterday, I received a few messages telling me that my article on school lunches was being heavily discussed on Reddit -
I was pleasantly surprised it hadn’t been zapped, so took a look.
95% of the comments were positive, and many Kiwis appear to feel angry at the ‘free market, public-private enterprise delivery’ model delivered for the kids.
It’s clear it’s not working.
As Professor Boyd Swinburn told Checkpoint, under the old Ka Ora, Ka Ako Health Lunch programme, there were a total of ~300 quality complaints and ~88 meal appeal complaints over 182 weeks
i.e over 3 and a half years.
Under the Coalition government’s new program -
"We've had that number of complaints in the first week just about.”
Think about that - that’s extraordinary.
And this is within the context of Ministry of Education staff confirming contact with the School Lunch Collective “had been difficult” - and many schools giving up.
But amidst all that, I found criticism - which I’m going to respond to.
One user said my writing was equivalent to ‘Russia Today’ - which is typical of the stuff used against me over the last year to discredit my writings and research.
All objections can however, be summarily captured as: “But David Seymour said”
1. But David Seymour said there was positive feedback on the school lunches!
Yes, that’s precisely what Seymour told Newsroom last week:
“..The quality of the food is higher than news stories (and social media photos) suggest and that delivery issues have been smoothed out….we’re getting a lot of feedback from principals who actually say they believe that their children think that the food is better than the previous offerings”.
But, when media asked Seymour’s team exactly how Seymour was keeping track of the positive feedback, they were told there was really no “official record”.
And, from the Collective, further questions “should be directed to the PR company Acumen or to the big lunch contractor Compass Group.”
And yes, Seymour was keen to stump up on anecdotes - the forte of this government - but that’s not an official stance - and Seymour’s track record of lying on the official record means we should be very careful.
2. But David Seymour said he did give Compass nutritional requirements!
Last year, as I covered, the Health Coalition Aotearoa noted of the new school lunches:
“There is no mention of any evaluation plan for the new program or the expected outcomes that it will deliver.”
Furthermore, in the Newsroom article, David Seymour posits nutritional requirements and care, yet there is no evidence of this anywhere:
“Nutrition standards had not been finalised when the Cabinet paper was written”.
Affirming the MOE OIA response:
“I can advise that the government’s decision to change the Ka Ora, Ka Ako | Healthy School Lunches programme preceded the receipt of any nutritional assessment or proposals. The decision to change the programme then led to the government going out to tender.”
i.e. The Cabinet paper didn’t include nutrition standards, and they went to tender before any consideration of it.
Seymour and Stanford had also fired nearly all of the nutritionists in the School Lunches Programme and Seymour has not offered any evidence to reject the common criticism the food is not nutritionally focused.
Public health nutritionists estimate that calories and size of the new lunches has been reduced by “at least” 1/3 as well - and the food is nutritionally opaque.
3. But David Seymour said the old program had a lot of waste too!
Official estimates put the “waste” of the old school program at ~10%.
Labour explained this was primarily due to school absences, while National and ACT had put it down to food being sent to kids who didn’t need it.
A Ministry of Education survey for the old program also showed 61% were then taken home by students and 21% were given to the community.
Now contrast this with the 50%, 60%, 71% waste being reported just in the last few days.
And only 16% fully eaten in some cases.
And the fact that most of these are now - according to the Ministry of Education nutritionist - “out of control waste” and going to landfill, adding further costs on to the schools, and our environment.
4. But David Seymour said school lunches should have been cancelled anyway
Yes, after posturing about cutting school lunches for months last year, Associate Education Minister David Seymour finally announced in May that “sushi’s woke”.
And he would keep school lunches, delivering food to kids in need, but saving ~$100mn compared to Labour:
"Students will receive nutritious food that they want to eat.
It will be made up of the sorts of food items thousands of mums and dads put into lunch boxes every day for their kids - forget quinoa, couscous, and hummus, it will be more like sandwiches and fruit"
I guess this is why students have been served butter chicken 11-13 days in a row and pies.
But yes, David Seymour had always criticised school lunches and the unacceptable “waste”.
A lot of opinion really comes down to whether folks trust David Seymour over the facts and reports coming out from principals, teachers, schools, parents, kids, public health professionals, and students.
David Seymour has lied on the record to media, Parliament and Kiwis - for example, when he said that he didn’t know he couldn’t drive the jeep up Parliament stairs - but was captured on video being warned not to drive there - twice.
Sure, it was all a probably cheap stunt to remove focus from Seymour lobbying top police for Philip Polkinghorne during a live murder investigation, and telling Tim Jago’s paedophile victim’s family to call an ACT employment lawyer when they told Seymour Jago was a “sexual predator” - but cheap tricks seem to work.
And no one knows that more than Atlas Network junk tank trained David Seymour.
Maybe Jacinda Ardern had it right after all.
Jacinda Ardern "Such an arrogant prick" MP comment transcript sells for NZ$100,000
“Can you give an example of making a mistake, apologising for it propertly, and fixing it?
This is a question that can be asked of Seymour.
In 2022, then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern apologised after being caught calling David Seymour an “arrogant prick”.
Seymour had asked Ardern in Parliament:
"Can the prime minister give an example of her making a mistake, apologising for it properly, and fixing it?"
Ardern’s response:
“There's been a number of occasions where we acknowledge that we will not have perfect responses.”
"We've openly said that, for instance, managed isolation and quarantine was something that was very difficult at the time and that there were people affected by it and that we would do things differently if we were ever confronted with that again ... but I stand by the work that we've done as a government over this last year and over this past term.
"We've always made decisions that we believe to be in the best interests of New Zealand at the time.
Now just waiting for Seymour to apologise and fix this problem.
Our schools, principals, teachers and kids don’t deserve Seymour’s school lunches debacle - which is adding thousands of dollars on to individual schools, and hours of administrative burden too.
Well written Mountain Tui. Thank you for exposing the hypocrisy and ‘alternative facts’ as bare-faced lies.
My question is: how can this sort of behaviour go on?
As our country struggles with the impact of child obesity and its associated long term health problems (and costs) we're swapping healthy, locally made lunches for industrial scale processed "food". While we may save a few dollars this year (and I say may) the long term cost is likely to be frightening. Seymour is teaching our kids that this slop is food - it's not.