David seymour against a chequered tablecloth background with a lunchbox on top

Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONPoliticsSeptember 16, 2024

Has David Seymour ‘saved’ school lunches – or enshittified them?

Contributing writer

Image: Tina Tiller

The Act leader’s scheme to cut spending on the free school lunch programme not only subtly shift costs from central government to schools, it also risks damaging the very thing that makes the programme work, writes Max Rashbrooke.

You mightn’t think that giving kids free lunches would be “one of the most direct ways to tackle intergenerational poverty”. But that’s what Ragne Maxwell, principal of Porirua College, thinks it is. And that’s what, in her view, remains under threat, despite the National-led government’s claim to have “saved” the free school lunches programme.

The scheme, a signature Jacinda Ardern achievement, currently feeds 220,000 pupils in the poorest quarter of schools, with potentially far-reaching consequences. “Food is the first, and best, medicine,” says Maxwell’s fellow principal Jason Ataera, who runs nearby Tairangi School.

And it’s a much-needed intervention. New Zealand data shows that children who frequently go without food are, when it comes to school results, four years behind their well-fed peers.

Fortunately, international research finds that school food programmes lift pupils’ marks. They leave children more alert and better able to learn, and physically and mentally healthier. The schemes also create “lifelong educational and health benefits”, according to the Public Health Communications Centre. “[The] improvement in diet quality and broader taste preferences, through exposure to new foods, translates to improvements in children’s mental health, dental health, and reduced risk of chronic diseases later in life.”

Most participating New Zealand schools report higher student attendance, improved behaviour, and rising achievement rates. The latest research shows that children in Ka Ora Ka Ako, as the lunches scheme is known, are “more settled and able to engage with classroom activity and learning … the programme is having a profound impact on the wellbeing of learners.”

Act leader David Seymour, though, has long opposed the scheme, and hinted at a desire to scrap it entirely. Faced with furious campaigning earlier this year, the government announced in early May that it would retain the scheme. But it would cut the cost by around one-third, removing $107m from its $323m annual budget.

Recently released tender documents reveal how this is supposed to work. Until now, schools have been funded to either cook the lunches onsite or use an external caterer of their choice. Under the new system, this arrangement will continue for children in years zero to six, the core primary cohort. But for intermediate and secondary pupils, the ministry will issue centralised contracts for caterers to deliver mass-produced “heat and eat” meals.

This system, designed to reduce the per-meal cost from around $6 to $8 currently to just $3, could – the tender documents hint – be rolled out to all children from 2027 onwards. The documents also suggest nine “example meals”. Although one is a tuna sandwich, the others are basic but reasonably appealing hot meals: “hidden vegetable butter chicken”, “vege-loaded mac n cheese”, “Mexican rice & bean burrito”, “savoury mince with roasted seasonal veges”, “teriyaki chicken” and so on.

One big problem, though: the government doesn’t know if caterers can deliver what it wants. A March briefing paper, seen by RNZ, admitted officials had not “market-tested or otherwise analysed the proposed $3 per head price. We do not know whether sufficient supply exists to offer lunches to the specified standard at this price across the full range of schools.” Even if it does, officials have already admitted that the cheaper meals may be less nutritious than the old ones.

And while contractors will be paid to cook and deliver the meals to the school gates, Seymour has cut all funding for the actual food service: the microwaves schools will have to buy to heat the meals, the staff to oversee the process and deliver the state-mandated food safety plan, and the composting and packaging disposal afterwards. Any school that wants to keep cooking its own food will face an even larger bill, probably in the tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Not only does Seymour’s scheme subtly shift costs from central government to schools: it also risks damaging the very thing that makes the programme work. Maxwell says it has drastically cut children’s intake of things like fizzy drinks and pies, and led to fewer fights started by “hangry” kids. Porirua College has even shifted its lunchtime to 11.20am, so that pupils spend more of the day with full stomachs – and high concentration levels. Of the recent improvements in the school’s performance, she says, “the biggest single factor would be the school lunches”.

Even more importantly, lunch becomes an opportunity to talk to pupils about healthy eating choices. Reframing a conservative talking point, Maxwell says: “You are not just giving them fish, you are teaching them about fishing.”

Couldn’t she do that with the butter chicken and burritos that the centralised providers may deliver to the school gates? Not necessarily. Quite apart from the cuts to service costs, Maxwell’s great worry is that the centralised providers simply won’t do what her school’s kitchen does: tailor meals minutely to what her children want to eat. And then the scheme’s most crucial benefits could fall apart.

Porirua College cooks its own meals in part because, Maxwell says, it constantly hears from other schools about the “poor” quality of meals from cost-cutting contractors. And it’s the local tailoring that changes the eating habits of kids who grow up seldom if ever tasting nutritious food.

Accompanied by fruit and yoghurt, Porirua College’s meals are “attractively presented”, Maxwell says. “This is what’s luring kids into eating things they’ve never wanted to eat. You are talking about intergenerational issues … The kids are learning that healthy food can be delicious, and these are meals they could [in future] cook for their own children. It’s an absolutely magnificent intervention.” Conversely, one foil-wrapped container of butter chicken per child is not going to generate the same enthusiasm – nor the long-term behaviour change.

The careful tailoring of meals has also cut food waste to near-zero levels. On a typical day, Maxwell says, there’s nothing more than “a little scraping [of leftover food] at the bottom of the bin”. The danger is that Seymour’s great centralised “money-saving” exercise will actually generate more waste. As Ataera bluntly puts it: “If you start serving crap, you are going to create the problem you are trying to solve.” In recent years, the term “enshittification”, denoting the gradual degradation of many aspects of modern life, has taken on a certain currency; the fear is that the school lunch scheme will fall victim to the same trend.

If the government wanted efficiencies, Maxwell says, Porirua College’s experience – and the profit margins she hears external caterers enjoy – would suggest more in-house provision was the way to go. For his part, Ataera gave a speech last month warning that the new system might have been designed to work so badly that schools would give up on it: “We have been intentionally underfunded to cause schools to have to close the programmes, and [politicians] can pretend it was the schools’ decision.” Those fears notwithstanding, he’s currently trying to keep an open mind – but the outlook is not encouraging.

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a pink tinged island with water around it and there is images of money in the waves

As the water rises, the question of how climate action is funded becomes more relevant. Pictured: an island in Kiribati. (Image: The Spinoff/Getty Images)

PoliticsSeptember 13, 2024

New Zealand isn’t doing enough to fund climate action. This is how we know

Shanti Mathias

Contributing writer

As the water rises, the question of how climate action is funded becomes more relevant. Pictured: an island in Kiribati. (Image: The Spinoff/Getty Images)

Climate funding is an essential part of the agreements used to reduce the impact of climate change. But is New Zealand contributing our fair share?

At the Pacific Islands Forum held in Tonga in August, climate change was a key topic. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, described how the stakes of climate change were incredibly high for Pacific countries. “If we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves,” he said. A major discussion at the forum was a climate and disaster resilience fund announced earlier this year, aiming to reach $US500m by January 1, 2026. Australia, China and the US – all major players in the Pacific, as well as significant fossil fuel producers – have pledged to commit funding.

So far, New Zealand hasn’t. “We’ll have more to say very shortly,” prime minister Christopher Luxon said during the forum in Tonga, as reported by RNZ. Aotearoa already gives Pacific countries $325m a year of climate-specific funding. But with the world getting warmer, disasters becoming more common and the Pacific one of the most vulnerable, contested areas, are we doing enough?

“Fairness is essential – it’s the glue that holds the world together. We can’t respond to the climate crisis if it’s each to their own,” says Olivia Yates, a climate change researcher at World Vision. In collaboration with Oxfam, the organisation has recently released a report investigating what New Zealand’s fair share of climate finance is, by calculating New Zealand’s overall gross national income and how much we’ve contributed to climate change.

a woman with brown hair and pale skin wearing a huge smile and big glasses, a dork orange shirt and black jacket with trees in the background — Olivia Yates researches climate change at World Vision (Photo: Supplied)

For the first time, the research went beyond emissions since 1992 (when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed), and calculated New Zealand’s historical contributions since 1850. “When we calculate emissions since 1850, New Zealand’s fair share increases, because of the impact of deforestation that was caused by colonisation, and the impact of the agriculture sector,” Yates says. The numbers aren’t inspiring: based on the 1992 calculation, New Zealand’s $325m pledged contribution to climate finance was 58% of a fair contribution. But when emissions since 1850 are taken into account, New Zealand’s pledge is barely a third of what we’re responsible for, at 34%. It’s one of the many climate commitments New Zealand isn’t currently meeting.

Climate finance, and the many international agreements that govern it, can seem like the boring side of the climate crisis. Details about how to calculate who pays, how much, and where the money goes can feel trivial in comparison to the visceral stuff: holding a roof down in a cyclone, watching crops wither because they are inundated with salt water, the smell of piles of rotting fish killed by a marine heatwave. But these details (and the many initialisms that accompany them) matter, because the damage climate change is causing now, and the damage that will happen in the future, affect different communities unevenly.

“What we see with global patterns of climate change is that the countries most affected are paying more to service debt than they receive in aid from wealthy countries,” Yates says. In the report, which Yates co-authored, New Zealand’s contribution to climate finance is compared to other similarly-sized wealthy countries: Finland, Denmark and Ireland. Each has pledged more to climate financing than Aotearoa. Denmark, particularly, is well ahead, with $NZ1.46 billion pledged to lower-income countries. “After assessing historical emissions, we lag behind – we have a larger responsibility to provide our fair share of climate finance,” Yates says.

According to Yates’ and her colleagues’ calculations, New Zealand is responsible for 0.38% (for emissions since 1992) to 0.66% (for emissions since 1850) of the world’s climate commitments. That’s a fraction of a percent – but given that the global climate goal, set at Cop15 in 2009, is $NZ146 billion a year ($US100 billion), that means New Zealand should be contributing $558m-$953m to climate financing each year. That could be more after Cop29 in Azerbaijan in November, where it’s expected that a new, higher goal for climate finance will be set.

an older brown man with a rocky shore and the sea behind him and a shock of curly white hair — Festus Ahikau is a grandfather of 10. He's lived in Makira Island in the Solomon Islands since 2015. He lost his beachfront home to the sea in January 2020 and such destructive tides are becoming more common, and has had to move inland. (Image: Supplied by World Vision)

But there’s another big question in climate finance, too: is the money simply being repurposed from existing aid budgets? New Zealand has a set amount of international aid (called “official development assistance” or ODA by the UN) money – much of which is being repurposed as climate finance. There are obvious overlaps between the goals: money that builds stronger houses that can withstand increasingly frequent cyclones can alleviate a social need for housing and increase climate resilience simultaneously.

Rules known as Rio markers determine whether funding is going to biodiversity, desertification or climate change objectives and how much of it can count as climate financing. But, Yates says, these markers can still be ambiguous. “They might say this particular project supports mitigation or increases resilience, but climate change isn’t integrated into the projects.”

While climate change is an urgent issue for many low-income countries – especially the Pacific countries New Zealand has committed to send a majority of aid funding to – that doesn’t mean that other initiatives don’t need funding too. “Countries on the frontline of climate change are often so battered that critical funding for women’s rights or supporting education or reducing gender-based violence all goes into recovering from a cyclone,” Yates says. In Vanuatu, for example, 61% of the country’s GDP went to recovering from Cyclone Harold and Covid in 2020. “When so much money goes into recovering from the damage, there’s less funding for the whole community,” Yates says. (World Vision does extensive work in Vanuatu.)

three people, an woman in a graphic tshirt, a yount boy of about thirteen in a green tshirt and a grandma with a curly afro, with mangroves and the saw in the background, looking a bit glum — Grandmother Mae Kosui with her daughter-in-law Loretta Boru, and her grandson Timothy, 13. The family has had to move from the island as it gets smaller due to sea level rise. (Photo: Supplied by World Vision)

The quality of aid funding matters: while multilateral loans can count as part of climate financing, aid organisations like Oxfam and World Vision consider public grants to be the best form of funding, giving communities more autonomy over how money can be spent. According to the Oxfam report, only 20% of Ireland’s funding reaches the community level. That said, only 8.6% of its overall climate finance comes from its foreign aid budget.

“It’s important to have funding and finance for separate components of a fair and equitable society – not just climate change,” Yates says. That might be difficult, with New Zealand’s aid funding already in the spotlight. Foreign minister Winston Peters has promised a review of the spending following $30m of cuts to areas outside the Pacific and Southeast Asia in the May budget.

While the details of climate financing can be confusing, they’re also important, and sure to be hotly debated at the next Cop conference. Yates would like to see funding for efforts to adapt to the effects of global heating and mitigating the emissions that cause it clearly delineated. Money for responding to loss and damage caused by climate change is essential too. At the Pacific Islands Forum, in international meetings and at the next Cop, advocates want the questions of climate finance to stay on the table. “We have an opportunity to stand with the Pacific, stand with children and communities, to create a fairer and stronger finance target,” Yates says.

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