David Seymour likes to think he’s the smartest man in any room. It is this hubris that is getting him in trouble, along with his penchant for breaking Cam’s First Rule of Politics: explaining is losing.
Watching that video Seymour comes across as a petulant school boy explaining exactly how it is completely believable that his dog ate his homework.
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.
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.”
RNZ
Look, on many of those points David Seymour might have an argument, but politically he stepped into a minefield laid by the Labour Party and the teacher unions, as well as the Media Party.
There is literally nothing he can say or do to make any of them happy. It was always a trap and David Seymour, merrily when prancing and dancing his way into the middle of the minefield, set up a hopscotch court.
A good mate of mine would offer him this sage advice: ‘When you find yourself riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ Unfortunately David Seymour decided to remount, dig his spurs in and employ gratuitous whipping, only to find that that ‘Dog Tucker’ isn’t really a racehorse. Mind you some munter from Palmerston North would probably put $10 each way on it, in the third at Awapuni.
The best thing the government could do now is cancel the whole stinking mess: arrange for 50 loaves of bread, some butter, Marmite and a box of apples to be sent to the schools and have the kids make their own lunches.
Who feeds these kids in the school holidays? How many emaciated kids turned up on the first day of the new school year after six weeks of holidays?
The whole situation is bullshit, but there’s David Seymour arguing it out on Q+A, insulting people who don’t agree with him. I guess he didn’t go so far as to threaten to sue them, so there is that.
Stop explaining and cancel it. There: saved you millions.
