Melted plastic in food? Pork for Muslim students? The grossest slop photos you’ve ever seen? David Seymour has one thing to say to the school lunch naysayers: namaste.
Echo Chamber is The Spinoff’s dispatch from the press gallery, recapping sessions in the House. Columns are written by politics reporter Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Wellington editor Joel MacManus.
It sucks when you give something to people for free, out of the goodness of your own heart, and they can’t even muster up a “thank you”. This must be how associate education minister David Seymour is feeling right now, endlessly exposed to a barrage of “why are you giving kids disgusting lunches?” instead of “why can’t lazy parents express their freedom of choice and feed their own children?” Anyway, it seems there could be a new slogan for the coalition government on the horizon, courtesy of the soon-to-be-deputy-prime-minister – but we’ll get back to that.
Speaker Gerry Brownlee kicked off yesterday’s question time by making a decision on the use of “Aotearoa” in the House – you may remember this important plotline from sitting day episode 8, first teased in earlier episodes, in which Winston Peters went off on the Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March for saying something something “Aotearoa”. Guided by the New Zealand Geographic Board’s approach, Brownlee ruled that Aotearoa is OK, other people don’t need to say it if they don’t like it, and Menéndez March might like to stick “New Zealand” at the end when he uses it.
“That really is the end of the matter,” Brownlee told the House. Peters had entered midway through, and deputy leader Shane Jones was in Canada, so only time will tell if NZ First’s top dogs got the memo.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins began Tuesday’s oral questions with the go-to line – “does the prime minister stand by all his blah blah blah” – before revealing his true motives: the coalition’s revamped school lunch programme, and the head chef behind it whom the opposition argues must get out of the kitchen: Seymour. If you have forgotten all 10,000 school lunch controversies since the programme relaunched two months ago, Hipkins summed it up this way: “feeding children melted plastic, failing to deliver lunches at all, serving up the same food 13 days in a row, or serving pork to halal students”. Now, Hipkins asked, will the government sort out the school lunch mess?
Luxon repeated advice he had shared via Newstalk ZB earlier that morning: “I just say to parents that may be listening to this, feel free to prepare a Marmite sandwich and an apple for lunch.”
That kicked the barracking from the opposition benches up about 50 decibels. “That is the last mass outburst that we’re going to hear today,” the speaker warned. Little did he know, but easily could he have guessed, that was not to be the last mass outburst of the day.
When the Greens’ co-leader Marama Davidson rose for her oral question (which, evidently, was the same as Hipkins’), Luxon didn’t budge on his position, but he did get support. Peters interjected with a yells-at-clouds supplementary that wasn’t quite a question, but more a reminder of how long he’s been on the block. Has the government considered, he asked, that there were once very poor Māori schools who didn’t rely on the state and made the girls work in the kitchen to feed everyone? What about those good old days?
“I take objection from a number of people who get up and give their views … [on] events that they know nothing about – poverty: how it smells, how it feels, what it tastes like – and they show it every day in this House,” Peters, once a boy who walked to school barefoot or by horse and now a man on an annual salary of $354,100, said.
“Well, that was helpful,” Brownlee replied.
Labour’s spokesperson for education, Jan Tinetti, also had a go at scrutinising the government over school lunches and to his credit, Seymour did admit that “plastic containers melting into food is not a part of the programme”. But his long-winded response on quality control suggested a speaker’s warning for Seymour to keep his answers “concise” had fallen on deaf ears, and the Greens’ co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick was fed up with being fed word slop: “It’s ChatGPT at this point!”
Even if he’s struggling to deliver up-to-standard school lunches, Seymour is always ready to serve up a comeback. “If that member used ChatGPT, she’d make a lot more sense,” Seymour responded. “And ChatGPT doesn’t hallucinate as much as that member.”
Tinetti’s attempts at speaking truth to power hit a snag. Seymour embarrassed her by revealing it was Young Act who had provided the faux school lunch photo she later removed from social media, and claimed that in fact, many people would love these meals for lunch (just not the children who refuse to eat them).
“Now, a lot of people I know, if someone gave them butter chicken for free 13 times, they wouldn’t be complaining,” Seymour said. “They’d actually be thrilled. Namaste.”
So why, Tinetti implored, did Seymour miss a “please explain” meeting with education minister Erica Stanford if he’s so confident about his controversial lunch programme? Well, Seymour responded, the Act Party’s morning caucus meeting had run late, and expecting a group of “tight, busy and productive” people to be available for an urgent meeting is a big ask.
And who chairs that caucus, interjected Willow-Jean Prime.
“Oh, the chairmanship of the Act caucus I’m being asked about now, Mr Speaker,” said Seymour. “I’ve got to say that I am a great admirer of David Seymour’s chairmanship.” At last, someone was singing his praises.
