I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. A brainchild of the previous Labor government, the Healthy School Lunches program provides free lunches to about two hundred and forty two thousand students in greatest need. Since its launch, the program has often been a target by politicians and commentators of
the cost involved in the scheme. It's now under supervision of Associate Education Minister David Seymour, and a cheaper alternative to it launched this year, but it's faced a myriad of issues, notably incidents of unappetizing, late or absent food deliveries and a more serious case of one child suffering second degree burns from a hot lunch. As a result, hundreds of meals have been left uneaten and now one company contracted to deliver the food has gone into liquidation.
So why are free school lunches such a source of controversy and can the government get past the negative headlines around them? Today on the Front Page, we're joined by Victoria University of Wellington politics professor doctor Lara Greaves to discuss why there's no such thing as a free lunch, Lara, are you surprised by how often we've been talking about
school lunches so far this year? I mean we're only about a month and a half into the school year, and it feels like every week we've heard stories about this.
I mean, look, Kaur, I'm not surprised about the school lunches. Is the fact that there are pictures. So this is one of those political issues where you can actually just take a photo of a school lunch and voters can make snap judgments based on a whether they would eat
the food or b whether they wouldn't. It's kind of one of those issues where it's quite tempting and it's quite a simple, black and white kind of issue for voters when they see, you know, a picture of food and the same way that people say things like the flag riferind was quite an easy issue for people get their heads around, you know, like you haven' like a flagg you don't. We're not talking about something like, you know, end of life choice or any kind of big moral
ethical issue. It's being framed in terms of is this food yucky or yummy? Basically, and so that has meant that it's captured a lot of political attention because journalists, you know, here's a photo. We don't need to go and like do some kind of big investigation. This is just simple photo proof.
Well, the eighty five million dollar annual contract was won by the school lunch Collective. Now that's a partnership between Compass Group and ZAID Liberal Group and Gilmore's Liberal Group has actually since gone into liquidation. That's going to be causing the government an enormous headache.
Well, it's just a saga that's ongoing, really, isn't it. I think one of the things that it speaks to is the idea that National campaigned on that last election as being able to better manage the country and campaigned against laborhood had you know, all those issues in cabinet and we're going down on various indicators. So National really
campaign on that. And what we have here now is we have David Seymore quite firmly and the Associate Education Minister kind of portfolio in charge of this specific contracting, in charge of this delivery of these school lunches. And so what it becomes has it becomes a test so to speak, of the government, and more specifically, of course, the buck stops off the Education Minister at the end of the day with therap A Stanford. But that's what it comes down to, and we've heard kind of the
latest was that term two. This is all meant to be sorted out by so the government have kind of set a bit of a end too, the potential school lunch saga, although we'll see what happens there. But basically I think there's a lot of moving parts. There's a story every couple of days around this, and it's quite.
Really well, it's an absolute shattels, a dismal failure.
It's the debarcle.
A major union is calling for Erica Stanford to be put in charge. The Associated Minister has really failed our
children and failed to provide good, healthy, wholesome lunches. Chris Hipkins giving the house are low lights reel if it hasn't taken feeding children melted plastic, failing to deliver lunches at all, serving up the same food thirteen days in a row, or serving pork to Halal's students, what will it take for him to finally step in and sort out the mess that his government is made of the school lunches program?
How much do you reckon It's damaged the coalition.
It's really hard to tell how much it's damaged the coalition. I've been trying to find political polling on the issue of school lunches. So there are a couple of separate issues here. The first one is the extent to which someone believes that the government should be providing school lunches. And that's where I was quite surprised initially that a center right government did support school lunches and did keep
the school lunch program going. So that was quite surprising initially, especially with someone like act in government too, because they could have used that as an excuse or you know, I talked about the ideology behind not having school lunches and pulling it initially, so there was that initial kind of almost misalignment with what you would expect the government's political ideology to be. So then we're kind of going into starting to go into that kind of territory of Okay, well,
if it's not ideology, what else. Is it quite possible that public opinion indicates that people want the school lunches, people like the school lunchers. The only poll that I could find was commissioned. It was like a Talbot Mills poll prior to the change of government around whether people supported an expansion of the school lunches program, and that showed the majority of people did support that expansion into kind of more schools back in twenty twenty five. So
it seems like it's a popular program overall. But we haven't quite as far as I can seen any kind of high quality polling on this lately. So it must be one of those kind of middle voter vote winning
type issues. And ultimately, if that's the case, if it's those kind of swing voters, those medium voters, that kind of whatever, it is sort of five to ten percent of people that swing between labor and national if this is an issue they really care about, it makes a lot of things for the government to focus on it.
Yeah, I was quite surprised when the coalition came in and didn't scrap it immediately. But Seymour was quite proud of that one hundred and thirty million dollars annual cost savings he found in his model. But do you think we'd still even have free school lunches? Like you said that it must be appealing to someone.
There has to be something in that, because yes, ideologically it doesn't seem like Sema and others would be aligned with this. I mean, of course, all of the other thing we could do, we could step back for a moment and not be skeptical about politicians. I mean, all of the evidence show that you actually want to feed children, especially ones from lowestof economic backgrounds, so they can best concentrate in school, so they can make the most of
their learning, make the most of educational opportunities. So actually, every single piece of evidence points to the fact that kids need healthy school lunches that are delivered, you know,
in their lunch breaks and help fuel their learning. So perhaps it is a case of politicians actually going well, the evidence shows this, you know, it's a if we think of the broadest social investment co PAPA, which is long being part of the National Party platform, school lunches has to be part of it because it helps to you know, fuel education and make those kids make the
most of educational opportunities. So it could just be politicians actually acting on evidence, which I mean we're often quite syptical of well.
Prime Minister Christopher Laxon told News Talks and Bees Mike Hosking. If parents continue to be dissatisfied with the lunches, they should pack them themselves.
I just say to you, Yep, there's always going to be people that are unhappy with school lunches.
And they get that.
And if you really are unhappy with it, for God's sake, go make them my white sandwich an apple in a bag, just like you and I head.
Is there now becoming this attitude in New Zealand that parents should perhaps pack their own kids lunches, because that's the Prime Minister saying that.
It's hard because, like I said before, there's a group of people who ideologically really do not believe in the state providing lunches to parents. It's quite clear that that's a quite firm ideological position. So we know that that
idea exists in the population. We don't know how many people agree howleheartedly with that, and we don't know like who they vote for, although we could probably make an educated gift that they probably are more on the right wing side of the political spectrum, So we kind of
know that those people exist. One of the things, though, overall, is when something becomes a meme in politic we have this overall, we've seen this overall idea come up in terms of the preferred Prime minister, polling and various memes, various commentary that lux In is to some degree out
of touch. So one of the things that the government and lucks them have to be really careful about here is that that then doesn't go against what those medium voters, what there's middle voters view as New Zealand values viewers, giving people a fair goal, and that any kind of rhetoric doesn't just become a meme. Like I saw a lot of memes around about that Apple and there was a Vigiemite Marmite and there was a lot of Marmite jokes,
you know that kind of thing. So you just have to make sure that these things don't carry on and contribute to that idea that the government is disconnected from everyday New Zealanders and the economic issue.
Yeah, and to your point before on The Herald's Politics podcast, the panel there suggested that the fact that lux And has taken such a firm line on this suggests that might be what focus groups are telling them.
It was quite stark, actually, the way that the government's messaging on this changed almost overnight. In fact, I think it was overnight we had the mar Mate and Apple's line, and then every minister was using it, and that was the line because I think they might have done some focus grouping. Line denies that they have, but basically saying it is the parent's responsibility to provide lunches, and we have a wide base of people that think this, so we're going to lean into that.
Would you agree with that because it does feel, like you mentioned before, it's targeting a specific demographic of voters.
Well, when we look at that group of voters, has been work in the New Zealand Editude of Value study by Nicole Safale and others that looks at who those voters are in that seed to block the election. Studies looked at them as well, and they are that kind of tended to be more likely to be a woman, tended to be more likely to be middle aged, and that kind of group of people we can already kind of profile or stereotype is caring about kids lunches. So
that is quite possible that there are focus groups. There are people out there saying that this would be that school lunches are aligned in some way with key values, are aligned some way with the interests of center voters, And again it's a shame that we don't have more political polls and we don't have more kind of research and public opinion work on this, because every single data point that we have does indicate that this might be something that is focus group driven as public opinion driven,
and ultimately it does start to over time contribute to people's idea about the government, about their competency, about their decisiveness, and about their values.
Have school lunches turned into an ideological issue because there's definitely a large portion of the population who feels that the bare minimum of having a child is being able to feed them every day. Right. But on the other side, we know that poverty is a massive issue in this country, and these lunches perhaps are freeing up those families struggling
to make ends meet to put their money elsewhere. So is this just going to be an issue that causes controversy no matter who's running the country.
Ultimately, we've seen, especially since the Fourth Labor Government, over this last sort of what is it thirty forty years, we've seen a lot of discussion over the state's role in welfare and the state's role providing for children versus the responsibility of individual parents of parents of fauna or
families of communities and so on and so forth. So this is a repeated discussion that we had in New Zealand politics going back to at least the nineteen nineties, and actually you can kind of see it even earlier than that, and things like the family benefit in the
post World War two period. So it's one of those debates that we've long had in New Zealand politics and that we can expect every few years for this debate to evolve and change in a different way about the role of parents and the role of things like welfare and the role of the state. It had seemed when National and when this government came in that school lunches
were there to stay. I guess now it does remain to be seen as to whether the government will just in them, just hear the band aid off and take any public opinion hit whether they will continue this online. But ultimately school lunches are just a new version of that kind of role of the state and the role of welfare type political debates that we've been having for decades.
David Seymour was on this podcast last year and talked about how he agrees with providing school lunches in theory because it's good for the economy.
Would it be smart for New Zealand as a country to do what they do, and say the UK or partner of America where actually the kids lunch making is done by a company that delivers it to the school, and then parents who have the ability to pay, they pay. Parents who don't they get it subsidized by the government.
Might be better than millions of parents every morning getting up and spending a substantial amount of time making the lunch when they could be out being an accountant or working in a pharmacy, or doing whatever it is that those parents do.
Would you agree with that?
This is a hard one. So when we go back to something like what would it be the purpose or the point of having school lunches? One of the things, of course, I'm an academic, so I'm going to go back to what is the academic evidence here, And one of the things that colleagues in nutrition and education have been saying over and over again is that, yes, probably
giving school lunches will be good for the economy. There's definitely an argument there because kids need to be fed to be able to, you know, like actually make the most of educational opportunities and learn things, and then they go on to be better workers, better educated, you know, go into professions and so on and so forth. So there's definitely that argument there. The more time in the Morning's argument, I'm not I mean, it's probably one of
those interesting kind of examples. Again, can't speak to that, but overall, the body of evidence shows that long term, at least there's an argument that they would be better for the economy.
Yes, with the backlash we're seeing over the kids not eating the food and then being ungrateful, this, that and the other, it looking awful. I mean, I've seen some of those pictures. I would eat some of them, but I wouldn't eat others. Is there a real chance the coalition could just end the school lunch program altogether? I mean, is it really going to be that much of a big election issue?
Oh see, one of the things, the school lunch program now has continued on and going on and on and on. And this is the thing. Remember, we have to go back to the last leave of government. Here we build and how many houses they were going to build, went on and on and on, and to some degree, obviously crises interrupted that discourse. But we have to look at governments and like they will have these issues that go on and on and on, and for National, for the government,
it stands. I think they will want to try to end at least the discourse, and there's only a certain ways that they can do that. I have a distracting based on another issue. Either fixing the school lunch program is one way to do it, or getting rid of it. I mean, they're going to have to make some kind of decision because otherwise this will go on and on. People will get kind of bored of it. It will become a joke, it will become a meme, and it will become something that people can point to as the
failure of the government. And especially on your first term, you want to limit the failures that people can point to. You want to limit in the twenty twenty sixth election the extent to which Hipkins or Labor leader at the time can point at National and say, well, you failed on the school lunches. You couldn't even manage that program.
So it's going to be a continuing issue, and I think we will see some kind of ending of it, whether it is trying to distract everyone or ending the school lunch program.
What do you reckon is the most likely because they're not going to be spending any more money to make it any better.
Oh, it's a struggle, there isn't it. I wouldn't be surprised if they ended it. It aligns with the broader ideology. And we're still quite a way away up from the election. So there's certain certain kind of hits that you need to take in government with certain issues that you need to just sweep under the rug or lose or not succeed on, and this might be one of them for National But yeah, it remains to be seen, and it's also remains to be seen the extent to which it
would blowback on Seymour. We saw an interview on Q and A not long ago of Erica Stanford in the role as Education Minister, and she kind of did say, well, it's Seymour's area at Seymour's area. Yeah. The extent to which it reflects back on Seymour versus other parts of the coalition again remains to be seen.
Thanks for joining us, Lara Da.
Thank you.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzdherld dot co, dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.