The Cost Of A Meal That Sticks In The Throat

Alexia
Russell, for The Detail

In treating
school lunches as a service rather than an investment, penny
pinching risks raising costs above value.

It is the
story that keeps getting regurgitated.

The revamped,
slimmer, cost-cut school lunch scheme has provided a daily
diet of bad news stories, and there’s talk that it should be
re-evaluated.

The architect of the shrunken lunch
deal, associate education minister David Seymour, said
suggestions that it’s being run down deliberately with the
aim of scrapping it are “frankly a conspiracy
theory”.

“Our goal is to make sure that the healthy
school lunch programme works well, and works at around half
the cost of the previous programme,” he has said.

But
we are nearly at the end of term one. Questions are being
raised in Parliament over how long it’s going to take to get
fixed. Public health experts say we’re at a tipping point,
after warning signals all along the way, and it’s time to
take stock and do something quite different.

But with
all the talk of plastic in the food, teachers having to go
out and buy pies, late deliveries and endless butter
chicken, are we missing the larger debate?

Is school
lunch provision a service or an investment?

“I think
that question separates these two models, the one that we
have now and the one that originally was,” says Newsroom
political reporter Fox Meyer.

“Because I think if you
think of this as a service, something that you’re doing to
meet public health thresholds or fill a bottom line, then
it’s a bit of a box-ticking exercise. You know, we need to
have this bus that runs this route, all we need to do is
have it, once it’s there we can check that box.

“But
if you think of this school lunch thing as an investment,
and you look downstream at all of the consequences of having
a well-nourished childhood, especially in school which is
where you can guarantee that there is a meal … if you
think of that as an investment, you get much broader future
consequences coming out of this. And I think that difference
underpins the two philosophies going on here.

“One is
‘we need to nourish these children in this place’, and the
other one is ‘we just need to feed them’.”

Meyer gives
The Detail the statistics and study results that back up
claims that feeding school children has huge paybacks in the
long run, but said it’s harder to measure these future gains
against the headline of saving taxpayers $130
million.

“It’s very easy to put an economic dollar
number on costs,” said Meyer. “That’s a very easy number to
understand.

“What’s much harder to understand is the
value of the thing you’re getting for that cost.

“How
do you even measure values like this? Especially when we
know from international studies that the consequences of a
well-nourished meal for a child aren’t really visible until
maybe five years down the line. How do you measure that when
the programme isn’t even five years old? Do you look in the
classroom, do you look in the home, do you look in the
supermarket to see what ripple effects this has had on the
community?”

Meyer said it would be very cynical to
suggest that the government wants to do away with school
lunches entirely.

“Nobody in this debate genuinely
wants to see children going hungry in the classroom – I
think that’s ridiculous. Nobody’s that evil.”

He said
there are two conversations going on here.

“The first
one is a debate over whether or not you think the state has
a role in providing nutritious meals for kids in school.
That’s not the conversation we’re having right now – this is
not about whether or not we should be doing this.

“The
conversation we’re having right now is: as long as we are
doing this, we need to meet the bar we’ve set for
ourselves.”

MP turned political commentator Peter
Dunne is not entirely surprised that the lunch scheme has
turned into a debacle, but says he had expected a slightly
better outcome than we’re seeing.

“I think this is now
very problematic,” he said. “Because the one thing the
government cannot afford, having staked its reputation on
making these changes, is for the whole system to fall over
completely and there be no school lunches.”

He said a
standard universal operation across the country, instead of
the former scheme where local companies were used to provide
the lunches, was always going to have
difficulties.

And while he understands the
government’s reasons for cutting costs, he said coming down
from $8 to $3 per meal was always going to be a challenge,
even for the best of providers.

Dunne says if there’s
not a significant improvement over the next week or so, the
option of ripping up contracts and starting again starts to
loom as the obvious only solution.

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