Watch the full
interview on Q+A:
In an interview with
Q+A’s Jack Tame on Sunday, Associate Education
Minister David Seymour has accused critics of the
government’s revamped school lunch programme of
“nitpicking”.
It is no secret that the school lunch
programme has been plagued by problems – with Seymour
himself describing them as teething issues – after he
announced it would be pared back in
October last year. The new menu was expected to save
more than $130 million per year.
Earlier this week the
School Lunch Collective’s main food manufacturer Libelle,
which was supposed to have provided about 125,000 meals a
day, went
into liquidation.
Prior to that, RNZ had reported
concerns about the lunches which had been failed to be
delivered, or had turned up late – as well as having been inedible,
unappetising,
repetitive,
or failing
to meet dietary restrictions. One meal was so hot it
gave a child second-degree
burns.
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A survey of more than 200 principals and
area school teachers by the New Zealand Educational
Institute found 80 percent of the respondents were
not satisfied with the meals provided by the School
Lunch Collective. Of those supplied by the Compass lead
collective, just 7.5 percent were satisfied.
Seymour
told Q+A the revamped school lunch programme had
“shown two sides of New Zealand”.
“One is to point out
at every opportunity: ‘This is terrible,’ ‘This is wrong,’
‘It’s a conspiracy,’ ‘He’s trying to deliberately sabotage
it.’ The other is, ‘Yep, you know what? It’s not what
happens to you in life; it’s how you deal with
it.’
“And each time there’s been a problem, we’ve been
upfront, we’ve solved it, and it’s kept getting
better.”
Compass Group New Zealand managing director
Paul Harvey said 97.3 percent of the over 500,000 meals had
been delivered on time this week, which meant at least
13,500 had not been.
“Again, there’s two New Zealands,
right?” Seymour told Q+A in response.
“There’s
people who will want to nitpick and say, ‘Oh, but you know,
I’ve done the maths. It’s 13,500. That’s what three percent
is, whatever.’ You’re welcome to do that. But I tend to take
the other view of life-that it’s not what happens; it’s how
you deal with it. And actually, we’ve overcome all those
problems to get to very high standards of
performance.”
Seymour had also refuted that the
remaining 2.7 percent had any effect on
education.
“What this government is doing is revamping
the curriculum. We’re revamping the qualifications. We’re
putting a huge amount of support into learning support and
making it easier for kids to be supported as they go through
their schooling journey.
“Now, if you seriously
believe that some school lunches showing up late-in some
cases, a few minutes late-is really what’s holding us back,
then I think we’re not really having a serious
conversation.”
On Friday, the principal of Massey
Primary School in West Auckland, Bruce Barnes, said students
received two cold scrolls for lunch.
“Each student
received two, about what looked like a hot cross bun size.
There’s a bigger one and a smaller one. They have a cheese
topping, and I saw red stuff on the inside, but they came
frozen and they’re very, very cold, stone cold,” Barnes told
Checkpoint.
He thought the scrolls would have
at least been thawed out since the school had no facilities
to heat them up.
In a Facebook post on Thursday,
Kimihia School in Huntly announced it would temporarily
suspend the school lunch programme, which Seymour told
Q+A had subsequently “got overwhelmed by parents and
students saying, ‘No, don’t do this, we want the
lunches.'”
“I think part of this whole saga is that
it’s shown the way that people decide to jump on every
little detail of the largest food delivery programme in New
Zealand history, when in reality, there’s a whole lot of
people who say we enjoy these meals.
“Many people say
they’re better than what we had last year, when they’re
getting on time delivery, when the quality is improving,
especially as we get rid of the wrinkle that’s caused most
of the problems.
“It’s actually a positive
story.”
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